ClickHouse, developers of an open-source OLAP database management system, has secured $250 million in Series B investment at a valuation of $2 billion. The new funding would allow ClickHouse to scale the adoption of its multi-tenant cloud solution on a global scale.
ClickHouse is an open-source columnar OLAP database management solution for SQL-based real-time analytics. It can process hundreds of millions to over a billion rows and tens of terabytes of data per server every second, outperforming comparable column-oriented database management systems on the market. Yandex, one of Europe’s top Internet service businesses, initially built the technology a decade ago to support its enormous online analytics platform.
“I’m delighted for our ClickHouse team. They created a truly unique technology and made it available as an open source solution, which turned out to be in great demand by the tech world,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO at Yandex Group. “Now ClickHouse Inc. is taking things to a new level, as it begins to build up an entire ecosystem of products around ClickHouse for businesses worldwide.”
The superior speed of ClickHouse’s technology, along with its quick adoption by industry leaders, would herald the emergence of a once-in-a-decade company. ClickHouse has swiftly established itself as one of the world’s fastest growing open-source database projects, as proven by its recent achievement of 20,000 GitHub stars. ClickHouse has a thriving and continually expanding community that has been critical to its continued success.
The investment was led by Coatue and Altimeter, with participation from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Lightspeed, Redpoint, Almaz, Yandex N.V., FirstMark and Lead Edge.
“We have been following the ClickHouse project for years,” said Caryn Marooney, General Partner at Coatue. “We are excited to join forces with this team as they continue to grow and achieve their goal of being an industry leader in this large and growing market.”
Uber, Comcast, eBay, Cisco, Cloudflare
In 2016, ClickHouse was released as an open source solution, and it quickly gained traction, with firms such as Uber, Comcast, eBay, Cloudflare and Cisco adopting it. Since 2016, over 800 contributors have submitted 20,000 pull requests.
“Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. With a mission as big as that, we’re careful to align with technologies that can scale with us,” said Usman Muzaffar, Head of Engineering at Cloudflare. “ClickHouse helps us efficiently and reliably analyze logs across trillions of Internet requests to identify malicious traffic and provide customers with rich analytics. We’ve been longtime supporters of ClickHouse, and appreciate how it has allowed us to scale log processing as we’ve built one of the world’s largest networks.”
In August 2021, building on its momentum, ClickHouse announced a $50 million Series A headed by Index Ventures and Benchmark, with participation from Yandex N.V. and others.
“From the first day we discovered the power of ClickHouse, we knew that this company would be something very special,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. “We are thrilled that great investors like Coatue and Altimeter have confirmed our early beliefs, and we look forward to the road ahead.”
Accelerated Growth ClickHouse
By raising $250 million in Series B funding, ClickHouse would double-down on open-source feature development and speed the creation of their commercial-grade cloud solution that’s secured, compliant and convenient for any customer to use. With this funding, ClickHouse intends to invest extensively in worldwide expansion, doubling the company’s size this year, and again in the next.
“Companies large and small are adopting ClickHouse because it gives tremendous improvements in data processing efficiency,” said Aaron Katz, CEO at ClickHouse. “Our mission is to make ClickHouse the first choice of analytical database management systems, and with this recent investment, we have the resources needed to achieve that ambitious goal.”
“We see a massive opportunity for ClickHouse to move the world of data infrastructure and analytics forward,” said Kevin Wang, partner at Altimeter Capital. “ClickHouse is radically transforming the way companies manage data analytics at scale, and this growth capital will fuel the vision to bring this to the global market. We’re excited to partner with Alexey, Yury, Aaron, and the world-class team at ClickHouse to build an iconic and market-leading company.”
