Manufacturing
ClickHouse, a fast-growing database software firm specializing in real-time analytics, is in advanced discussions to raise several hundred million dollars in new funding at a valuation of $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal, which is expected to be led by Khosla Ventures, would triple the company’s valuation from its last round in 2021 and marks a notable exception to the broader slowdown in software valuations since that time.
The company’s core product is a high-performance analytical database management system (DBMS) optimized for online analytical processing (OLAP). ClickHouse has gained traction with engineering-heavy teams that need to run large-scale queries against real-time data, clicks, logins, sessions without the lag associated with traditional data warehouses. Internal benchmarks published by the company suggest performance improvements of 100 to 1,000 times compared to traditional OLAP systems, depending on the workload.
ClickHouse originated as an internal project at Russian tech company Yandex in 2009, when software engineer Alexey Milovidov set out to build an OLAP database capable of generating reports from raw, streaming data at high speed. The system launched internally in 2012 to power Yandex’s web analytics platform and was open-sourced in 2016. By 2021, it had gained enough popularity to justify a full spinout. Milovidov joined forces with Aaron Katz, former CRO at Elastic, and Yury Izrailevsky, a veteran of Netflix and Google, to establish ClickHouse as a commercial entity. That was followed by a $250 million round led by Coatue and Altimeter, which valued the company at $2 billion.
