ClickHouse just closed a $400 million funding round that values the database technology startup at $15 billion—more than double what it was worth less than a year ago. The jump from $6.35 billion in May to $15 billion now is pretty dramatic, even by AI boom standards.
Dragoneer Investment Group led the round, with a solid lineup of investors coming in alongside them: Bessemer Venture Partners, Singapore’s GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, T. Rowe Price, and WCM Investment Management. That’s a heavyweight group, and the size of the deal signals just how hungry investors are for companies powering AI infrastructure.
ClickHouse competes with established players like Databricks and Snowflake, but it’s carved out a niche in real-time analytics—the kind of database work that AI agents and applications need to function smoothly. The company was spun out from Russian search giant Yandex more than four years ago and has since built a customer base that includes Meta, Tesla, and Anthropic.
What ClickHouse Actually Does
If you’re not deep in the database world, here’s the simplified version: ClickHouse builds software that lets companies manage and analyze massive amounts of data quickly. That capability matters a lot more now that everyone’s building AI applications that need to process information in real time.
Co-founder and CEO Aaron Katz says the fresh capital will go toward accelerating product development and ramping up sales and marketing. The company’s also acquiring Langfuse, a German startup that makes open-source tools for checking whether AI systems are producing accurate and safe results. Katz didn’t share what they paid for it, but the acquisition makes sense given where the industry’s headed.
“As you’re building an application, the next question is, as I take it into production, how do I know if it’s actually developing quality output?” said Tanya Bragin, ClickHouse’s VP of product and marketing. “I worry about that all the time.”
She’s not wrong to worry. AI hallucinations and unreliable outputs are real problems, and companies building AI products need tools to catch issues before they reach customers.
Growing Fast Outside North America
One interesting thing about ClickHouse: over half its customers, revenue, and employees are outside North America. That’s unusual for a Silicon Valley-based startup, and Katz sees it as an advantage. “It really enables us to double down on some of these international markets,” he said.
The company’s been adding customers at a decent clip. In the past three months alone, they’ve signed or expanded deals with startups like Lovable and Polymarket. With offices in the Netherlands and other countries, they’re positioned to keep growing internationally while U.S.-based competitors focus primarily on domestic markets.
In October, ClickHouse hired Jimmy Sexton as CFO. Sexton ran investor relations at Snowflake and has been through the IPO process twice before. That hire tells you where this is probably heading eventually, though Katz says they’re not ready to go public yet. “We are still running the company at a loss because we’re forward investing,” he explained. The startup’s pulling in “several hundred million dollars” in annualized revenue, but profitability isn’t the current priority.
Why Dragoneer Went All-In
Christian Jensen, partner and co-head of private investments at Dragoneer, spent months examining ClickHouse and talking to its customers before deciding to lead the round. After the company’s last funding round, Dragoneer reached out asking for an introduction and eventually told ClickHouse they wanted to invest.
“We think the opportunity for this business is gargantuan,” Jensen said. “It’s really rare to find a company that is growing this fast into an opportunity that size.”
Here’s where it gets interesting: Dragoneer has invested in some of ClickHouse’s competitors, including Datadog, Snowflake, and Databricks. Jensen acknowledges those companies “all continue to have great businesses in their core business,” but he thinks ClickHouse has an edge in real-time analytics right now.
“The real-time analytics is uniquely special for ClickHouse, and in particular this AI wave in combination with society’s demands for immediacy make ClickHouse uniquely effective,” he said. He also noted it’s cheaper than alternatives, which matters when companies are watching their AI infrastructure costs.
The Yandex Backstory
ClickHouse’s origin story is worth mentioning. The technology was originally created back in 2009 as a database management system for Yandex. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Yandex NV—the Dutch-based parent company of the Russian search giant—sold off its Russian business. The parent company rebranded as Nebius Group in 2024 and now owns less than 30% of ClickHouse.
That history hasn’t seemed to hurt ClickHouse’s ability to attract Western investors or customers, but it’s part of the company’s DNA and explains some of its international footprint.
For now, ClickHouse has the capital and momentum to push hard into the AI infrastructure market. Whether they can maintain this growth rate and justify a $15 billion valuation will depend on whether real-time analytics stays as critical to AI development as investors currently believe. But based on who’s writing checks and how fast the company’s growing, the market thinks they’re onto something real.
