Open-source database maker ClickHouse Inc. has raised $400 million in a late-stage Series D funding round at a $15 billion valuation, about six months after its previous raise. The round was led by Dragoneer and joined by GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price and WCM Investment Management. The company said the new funding follows a year in which its annualized recurring revenue rose by more than 250%, underscoring growing demand for its analytics-focused data infrastructure.
ClickHouse’s namesake columnar database is optimized for analytical workloads by placing columns in immediately adjacent storage sectors, which allows it to perform data analysis operations such as averaging product prices faster than many competing platforms. The system also speeds up queries by skipping over database sections that do not contain relevant records and by updating only the specific records that users wish to change instead of entire datasets. ClickHouse monetizes its open-source core through ClickHouse Cloud, a managed service that removes the need for customers to handle hardware or manually install updates, while allowing remaining administrative tasks to be automated via integrations with third-party management tools.
The company disclosed that ClickHouse Cloud has over 3,000 customers, including Meta Platforms Inc., Sony Corp. and Lyft Inc. As part of its Artificial Intelligence strategy, ClickHouse is acquiring Langfuse GmbH, an open-source tool provider for monitoring large language models, whose software companies use to track the latency and infrastructure usage of their LLM-powered applications and to collect workflow data that helps diagnose hallucinations. Langfuse already uses ClickHouse’s database to store telemetry, and ClickHouse plans to deepen this integration to make its platform a more competitive choice for Artificial Intelligence developers. The company will roll out the enhanced Langfuse integration alongside a managed transactional database based on PostgreSQL, which will be integrated with the ClickHouse columnar store so Artificial Intelligence applications can use ClickHouse for analytics queries and the PostgreSQL service for transactional tasks such as updating customer records.
