The fastest and most resource-efficient OLAP database
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2021 | Employees: ~500-700 | Stage: Late Stage / Unicorn | Website: https://clickhouse.com
ClickHouse began in 2009 as an experimental project inside Yandex by Alexey Milovidov to power Yandex.Metrica, the world's second-largest web analytics platform, delivering sub-second SQL on petabytes of non-aggregated real-time data. After three years of prototyping it launched in production in 2012 and was open-sourced in June 2016, rapidly becoming a top-50 DB-Engines database used by Uber, Spotify, eBay, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba, with 770+ external contributors. In September 2021 the team spun out of Yandex to form ClickHouse, Inc. as a Delaware corporation headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a major engineering hub in Amsterdam, led by Milovidov (CTO), Yury Izrailevsky (President, Product & Technology, ex-Google/Netflix) and Aaron Katz (CEO, ex-Elastic CRO, Salesforce).
The company commercializes via dual distribution: the Apache 2.0 open-source columnar DBMS and the serverless ClickHouse Cloud (private preview Apr 2022, public beta Oct 2022, GA Dec 2022) which decouples storage and compute, auto-scales to zero, and bills on consumption across AWS, GCP and Azure. It raised $50M Series A (Index/Benchmark) and $250M Series B at $2B (Coatue/Altimeter) in fall 2021, then $350M Series C at $6.35B led by Khosla Ventures in May 2025 (with BOND, IVP, Battery, Bessemer plus existing Index, Lightspeed, GIC, Benchmark, Coatue, FirstMark, Nebius) plus a $100M Stifel/Goldman credit facility, surpassing $650M total. With 100+ paying Cloud customers at GA and later acquisitions of PeerDB (Postgres CDC, July 2024) and HyperDX (observability, Mar 2025), ClickHouse targets AI/ML, observability and real-time warehousing workloads against Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Druid and Pinot.
ClickHouse is the Yandex-born OLAP engine turned unicorn infrastructure play, marrying a top-50 open-source database (30k+ GitHub stars) with a consumption-based Cloud that nearly tripled valuation to $6.35B in May 2025. With ~$100M ARR in 2024 (+300% YoY per company), backing from Khosla, Coatue, Altimeter, Benchmark, Index and Lightspeed, and 10x price-performance wins over Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks in independent benchmarks, it is positioned as the default real-time warehouse for AI-native workloads — but must out-execute hyperscalers and monetize open-source without alienating its community.
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