What is ClickHouse?
The world's fastest open-source real-time analytics database
- Category
- Real-Time OLAP Database
- Headquarters
- Mountain View, CA
- Founded
- 2021 (technology from 2009)
- Employees
- ~580
- Total Funding
- $1.05B+ equity + $100M credit facility
- Valuation
- $15B (January 2026)
What is ClickHouse?
ClickHouse is the world's fastest open-source columnar OLAP database, purpose-built for real-time SQL analytics at scale. The company crossed $250M ARR and 4,000 customers in May 2026, tripling revenue year-over-year while serving enterprises from Meta and Tesla to Anthropic, Capital One, and Shopify.
ClickHouse powers analytics workloads that demand sub-second query latency across billions of rows — the use cases that make traditional data warehouses buckle under load. The core engine is a column-oriented database that compresses and processes data with SIMD CPU instructions and a vectorized query engine written in C++, yielding throughput that the company demonstrated is 23x more cost-effective than its nearest cloud warehouse rival on its open CostBench benchmark, launched at Open House 2026 in May.
The company was incorporated in 2021 to commercialize the open-source ClickHouse database originally developed at Yandex by Alexey Milovidov starting in 2009, and released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2016. ClickHouse Cloud, the fully managed offering launched in December 2022, is the primary revenue vehicle, billing on a consumption-based model — compute by the minute, storage by the terabyte — with automatic scale-to-zero. The company grew Cloud ARR more than 250% year-over-year as of the January 2026 Series D, and tripled ARR overall by May 2026.
Beyond its database core, ClickHouse has broadened its platform through three acquisitions: PeerDB (Postgres change data capture, July 2024), HyperDX (open-source observability, March 2025), and Langfuse (LLM observability, announced January 2026 alongside the Series D). New products launched in 2026 include ClickHouse Agents (agentic analytics powered by Claude), Managed PostgreSQL (built with Ubicloud), ClickStack (observability GA), and full-text search. With over $1.05B raised, a $15B valuation, and an ex-Snowflake CFO on board, ClickHouse is openly charting a path to IPO.
What does ClickHouse offer?
ClickHouse offers a real-time OLAP database (open-source and cloud), observability tooling, AI/LLM infrastructure, managed PostgreSQL, and an agentic analytics layer powered by Claude.
- ClickHouse Open Source· Core Database
- ClickHouse Cloud· Managed Service
- ClickHouse Cloud Enterprise· Managed Service
- ClickStack (Observability)· Observability
- Langfuse (LLM Observability)· AI Infrastructure
- Managed PostgreSQL (via Ubicloud)· Database
- ClickHouse Agents· AI / Analytics
- Real-Time Analytics· Use Case
- User-Facing Analytics· Use Case
- Log & Event Analytics· Use Case
- AI Workload Backend· Use Case
- BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)· Deployment
- Self-Hosted / On-Prem· Deployment
How does ClickHouse make money?
ClickHouse generates revenue through consumption-based cloud pricing with no per-seat fees — customers pay for compute by the minute and storage by the terabyte, making costs tightly correlated to actual usage and creating a natural land-and-expand motion as data volumes grow.
ClickHouse Cloud has three tiers. Basic starts at $66/month and targets developers and small teams. Scale starts at $499/month and adds cross-region replication, advanced security controls, and SLAs for production workloads. Enterprise is negotiated individually for the largest and most regulated deployments, with dedicated hardware configurations, upgrade schedule control, and enhanced disaster recovery. Across all tiers, storage is priced at $25.30 per TB/month (compressed); compute runs at $0.2181, $0.2985, and $0.3903 per compute-unit-hour on Basic, Scale, and Enterprise respectively. ClickHouse introduced egress fees in January 2025 and grandfathered existing pricing for six months, signaling a deliberate shift toward higher unit economics.
The consumption model creates a natural land-and-expand motion: customers start on Basic or Scale, ingest more data as usage grows, and migrate to Enterprise as compliance requirements emerge. Gross margins are estimated at 75–80%, comparable to leading cloud data infrastructure peers. The open-source project — with tens of thousands of GitHub stars and a large self-hosted user base — serves as the primary top-of-funnel, converting developers who hit production scale constraints into ClickHouse Cloud subscribers. A $100M credit facility (Goldman Sachs and Stifel, closed alongside the Series C in May 2025) provides non-dilutive capital for working capital and growth investments.
ClickHouse crossed $250M ARR in May 2026, up from approximately $160M in early 2025, representing consistent 250–300% YoY Cloud ARR growth. Management targets the high-nine-figures ARR range by year-end 2026. New revenue vectors include ClickHouse Agents (agentic analytics, launched May 2026), Managed PostgreSQL, and the Langfuse LLM observability platform now embedded in the product suite.
Who leads ClickHouse?
ClickHouse is led by its three co-founders and a recently expanded executive team that includes an ex-Snowflake CFO and an ex-Atlassian/Slack CRO hired to build out enterprise go-to-market ahead of an IPO.
- Aaron KatzCo-Founder & CEO2021–presentFormer CRO at Elastic (pre-IPO) and SVP Enterprise Sales at Salesforce; leads go-to-market strategy and company-wide operations.
- Alexey MilovidovCo-Founder & CTO2021–presentOriginal creator of ClickHouse at Yandex starting in 2009; deeply hands-on with the core database engine and regularly publishes technical blog posts and GitHub commits.
- Yury IzrailevskyCo-Founder & President, Product & Technology2021–presentLeads product and technology strategy; publicly announced ClickHouse's IPO ambitions at Open House 2026 in May 2026.
- Jimmy SextonChief Financial OfficerOctober 2025–presentPreviously VP of Finance and head of investor relations at Snowflake for six years — hired specifically to navigate S-1 and IPO readiness. Also held finance roles at ServiceNow prior to Snowflake.
- Kevin EganChief Revenue OfficerJuly 2025–presentOver two decades of enterprise sales leadership; most recently Chief Sales Officer at Atlassian; previously led North America sales at Slack, Dropbox enterprise expansion, and global enterprise growth at Salesforce.
How do you contact ClickHouse's leadership?
ClickHouse's dominant email format (81% of employees per LeadIQ) is first@clickhouse.com — for example, aaron@clickhouse.com. A minority (~4%) use first.last@clickhouse.com. Contacts below follow the verified dominant format; none are confirmed personal published addresses.
aaron@clickhouse.comHow much funding has ClickHouse raised?
ClickHouse has raised over $1.05 billion in equity across four named rounds plus a $100M credit facility, most recently at a $15 billion valuation in the January 2026 Series D led by Dragoneer Investment Group.
The company's funding history spans five years of aggressive growth through four equity rounds. Series A (August 2021) raised $50M led by Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital, with Yandex N.V. participating — this round formed ClickHouse, Inc. as a Delaware corporation to commercialize the open-source project. Series B (October 2021) raised $250M at a $2B valuation just two months later, led by Coatue Management and Altimeter Capital, with additional participation from Lightspeed, Redpoint, FirstMark, Almaz, Yandex N.V., and Lead Edge Capital.
Series C (May 2025) raised $350M at a $6.35B valuation led by Khosla Ventures, with BOND, IVP, Battery Ventures, and Bessemer joining as new investors alongside existing backers Index, Lightspeed, GIC, Benchmark, Coatue, FirstMark, and Nebius. ClickHouse simultaneously closed a separate $100M credit facility led by Stifel and Goldman Sachs, providing non-dilutive working capital. By October 2025, ClickHouse extended the Series C with additional capital and announced a leadership expansion (CFO Jimmy Sexton from Snowflake; CRO Kevin Egan from Atlassian), signaling strong investor confidence and IPO preparation heading into the next round.
Series D (January 16, 2026) raised $400M at a $15B valuation — a 2.4x step-up from the Series C just eight months earlier — led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with Bessemer, GIC, Index, Khosla, Lightspeed, T. Rowe Price Associates, and WCM Investment Management participating. The round coincided with the acquisition of Langfuse, the launch of native PostgreSQL (with Ubicloud), and a Japan Cloud market-entry partnership. At announcement, ClickHouse had 3,000+ Cloud customers and ARR growing 250%+ YoY; by May 2026 it had reached 4,000 customers and $250M ARR.
How did ClickHouse get here?
From a Yandex internal experiment in 2009 to a $15B real-time analytics platform serving 4,000 customers in 2026.
- 2009Project Founded at YandexAlexey Milovidov begins developing ClickHouse internally at Yandex to enable real-time analytics on non-aggregated data for Yandex.Metrica, the company's web analytics product.
- June 2016Open-Sourced Under Apache 2.0Yandex releases ClickHouse to the public on GitHub, triggering rapid community growth that eventually surpassed 40,000 GitHub stars.
- August 2021ClickHouse, Inc. Incorporated — Series A $50MCompany incorporated in Delaware; raises $50M Series A led by Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital, with Yandex N.V. participating, to commercialize the open-source project.
- October 2021Series B — $250M at $2B ValuationLed by Coatue Management and Altimeter Capital, with Lightspeed, Redpoint, FirstMark, Almaz, and Lead Edge joining. Product development and global team expansion accelerates.
- December 2022ClickHouse Cloud Launches (GA)General availability of the fully managed cloud service on AWS, marking the transition to a consumption-based SaaS business model. Series B extended simultaneously.
- July 2024PeerDB AcquisitionClickHouse acquires PeerDB, a Postgres change data capture (CDC) specialist, to accelerate real-time analytics integration from transactional databases into ClickHouse.
- March 2025HyperDX AcquisitionClickHouse acquires HyperDX, an open-source OpenTelemetry-native observability platform, forming the foundation for the ClickStack product line.
- May 2025Series C — $350M at $6.35B ValuationLed by Khosla Ventures; company surpasses 2,000 Cloud customers and 300% YoY growth. $100M credit facility closed simultaneously with Goldman Sachs and Stifel.
- July 2025Kevin Egan Joins as CROFormer Chief Sales Officer at Atlassian and North America sales lead at Slack joins as CRO to build enterprise go-to-market ahead of IPO.
- October 2025Series C Extension + Leadership ExpansionSeries C financing extended; Jimmy Sexton (ex-Snowflake VP Finance and IR head) joins as CFO — a clear IPO preparation signal.
- January 2026Series D — $400M at $15B Valuation + Langfuse AcquisitionLed by Dragoneer Investment Group; Langfuse (LLM observability, 20K+ GitHub stars, 26M+ monthly SDK installs) acquired; native PostgreSQL service and Japan Cloud partnership announced. 3,000+ customers at announcement.
- May 2026$250M ARR and 4,000 Customers — Open House 2026ARR triples YoY; ClickHouse Agents (Claude-powered agentic analytics), CostBench (open cost benchmark), ClickStack GA, and House Mates partner program launched. IPO path publicly confirmed by co-founder Yury Izrailevsky.
Who are ClickHouse's competitors?
ClickHouse competes primarily with cloud data warehouses and open-source OLAP engines, differentiating on sub-second query latency, consumption-based pricing, and cost-per-query efficiency demonstrated by its open CostBench benchmark.
- SnowflakeThe dominant cloud data warehouse; stronger BI/governance ecosystem but materially slower on high-concurrency analytical queries. ClickHouse's own CostBench shows Snowflake as the nearest competitor and places it 23x worse on cost-performance at scale.
- Google BigQueryServerless and deeply integrated into GCP; typical query latencies run 1–2 seconds vs. ClickHouse's sub-millisecond, and costs escalate steeply at high query volumes and concurrency.
- Amazon RedshiftAWS-native petabyte warehouse; provisioned clusters require more operational overhead and lag on real-time ingest compared to ClickHouse's streaming-first, scale-to-zero design.
- DatabricksUnified lakehouse platform strong on ML/AI pipelines and batch ETL; Databricks SQL Warehouse competes on analytics but carries higher per-query cost on ClickHouse's CostBench workloads.
- Apache DruidOpen-source real-time OLAP optimized for time-series event data; benchmarks from StarRocks show Druid running ~8.9x slower than StarRocks on SSB flat tables, with ClickHouse also materially ahead.
- StarRocksOpen-source OLAP challenger that benchmarks favorably on denormalized table joins, claiming 2.2x faster than ClickHouse on SSB flat tables; targets the same user-facing analytics and real-time BI use cases.
ClickHouse — frequently asked questions
