Investing in ClickHouse to fuel the future of data

Generating business value and insights from data is increasingly happening in milliseconds, not minutes. Whether it's enabling AI agents to act independently, analyzing application, server and system logs to troubleshoot issues, extract valuable information, and detect anomalies within financial operations, or understanding user interactions by analyzing clickstream data, the ability to process and synthesize data quickly – and inexpensively – has risen to the top of the enterprise “must have” list.

AI agents, and their ability to generate queries faster and at a higher rate than humans, are at the heart of this demand. Companies that used to rely on dashboards tied to data sets in static batches are now pivoting to real-time, intelligent agents that can extract insights from mounds of data. The faster a company can get these insights, the quicker they can strategically pivot and realize, even monetize, value.

At the center of this new paradigm is ClickHouse, an open-source database management system built for the next wave of AI-related innovation. The company, which has grown over 300% during the past year and now serves more than 2,000 customers across industries – including financial services – is poised to be the low-latency, high-throughput solution for any company looking to act on large volumes of data.

The Growth of Data and Gleaning Insights

Digital transformations and shifts to AI-powered platforms have resulted in an explosion of proprietary corporate data. Initially, companies relied on humans to slice and dice data sets that were stored on servers and had short shelf lives.

But as technology evolved, specifically Generative AI (Gen AI), it became clear that companies could augment human efforts and do more with the growing amount of information their platforms generated.

ClickHouse was designed for this moment. The company’s open-source database facilitates online analytical processing (OLAP), which allows users to gain up-to-the-millisecond insights from databases using SQL queries. ClickHouse stores data in columns, rather than rows, making it an ideal solution for analytics, business intelligence and other complex queries.

ClickHouse’s Products

ClickHouse has achieved robust annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is one of the fastest growing enterprise infrastructure companies because its products can quickly, efficiently and, importantly, less expensively, tackle a variety of use cases for clients across industries. While the core ClickHouse technology is freely available in open source, ClickHouse Cloud provides the commercial version with additional features, scalability and management benefits. There is also the private “Bring Your Own Cloud” option for those enterprises looking for greater security or government entities in highly regulated environments.

ClickHouse sits at the convergence of multiple billion-dollar markets, including data warehousing, real-time analytics and observability. This unique position means its solutions appeal to a variety of customer use cases:

• Data warehousing: Customers can interactively slice and dice data for analysis, reporting and building internal applications, all at faster speeds and lower costs than others in the space. ClickHouse provides support for 70+ file formats and integrates with popular data visualization tools, language clients, dbt and more.
• Real-time analytics: ClickHouse allows for millions of rows of data to be ingested each second with high query concurrency to support mission critical and time sensitive applications.
• Observability: ClickHouse’s ClickStack unifies logs, metrics, traces and session replays in one platform. Customers can easily create dashboards and alerts that support Lucene-style search and full SQL access for advanced analysis.

Visionary Leadership Team

Aaron Katz, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, leads the ClickHouse team. He was previously the Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic and Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce.

Alexey Milovidov, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, originally incubated ClickHouse in 2009 at Yandex. He spun the company out in 2012 and has since leveraged his 14 years in a variety of engineering roles to power the company forward. Yury Izrailevsky, President, Product and Engineering, and co-founder, was previously a Vice President of Engineering at Google and a Vice President of Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering at Netflix.

Collectively, the management team has the right experience and technical knowledge to help companies unlock value faster in the era of AI.

The Road Ahead

We are excited to invest in ClickHouse’s extension of its Series C funding round, alongside Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures, Index Ventures, Benchmark and several other top-tier Venture Investors. The company’s momentum is clear, and our investment is just one data point in the company’s upward trajectory. Congratulations go out to Aaron, Alexey, Yury and the entire ClickHouse team!