ClickHouse in Talks for Funding as a Faster Snowflake Alternative

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.

While many software startups that raised capital in 2021 have since faced valuation resets, ClickHouse appears to be an outlier. Investors say the company has benefited from increasing demand for tools that support real-time analytics, as well as from a growing interest in infrastructure software that supports AI-driven workloads.

ClickHouse Cloud, the company’s first commercial product, launched in beta in October 2022. It reached general availability by the end of that year and has since become available across AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The service offers users the ability to run high-speed analytical queries without managing infrastructure, and is aimed at companies that prioritize performance and cost over broader platform tooling.

According to the company, ClickHouse is 100 to 1,000 times faster than traditional OLAP databases. Its internal benchmarks show that ClickHouse Cloud outperforms Snowflake in query speed, data compression, and infrastructure efficiency. Its customer list includes Cisco, GitLab, Sony, Lyft, Walmart, and Microsoft, many of which use ClickHouse to power event-based applications such as fraud detection, observability, and real-time marketing analytics.

ClickHouse has also moved to address one of its previous shortcomings: its lack of user-friendly tools for observability and debugging. In early 2024, the company acquired HyperDX, an open-source observability platform that had been built on ClickHouse’s own technology. HyperDX adds a frontend interface and session replay features to ClickHouse’s existing backend capabilities.

“Observability is fundamentally a data problem,” said Tanya Bragin, VP of Product and Marketing at ClickHouse. “The dataset size dictates how difficult and expensive it will be to build an observability platform. That’s why ClickHouse has been the backbone of observability platforms for years.”

HyperDX CEO Michael Shi said the acquisition formalized a longstanding technical alignment. “From the beginning, we built HyperDX around ClickHouse,” he said. “Joining forces just made sense. Our mission has always been to help engineers resolve production issues faster, and ClickHouse was central to that from day one.”

The company’s customer base includes firms like GitLab, Cisco, Sony, and Lyft, all of which use ClickHouse for event-level analytics and operational telemetry. While Snowflake remains the dominant player in cloud data warehousing, ClickHouse has gained a following among organizations looking for faster performance and lower cost at scale. The company claims 10x storage savings and significantly lower compute usage compared to traditional warehouses.

ClickHouse has more than 1,000 paying customers and continues to grow its footprint in a market increasingly defined by real-time requirements. The company’s backers believe its core strengths, speed, efficiency, and scalability are well aligned with the needs of AI-driven applications and interactive data products.

“The end-market opportunity is massive,” said Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures and early investor in ClickHouse. “The foundational technological advantages of having gone cloud-first, combined with this highly performant database, gives us a lot of confidence in where this company can go.”

To date, ClickHouse has raised over $300 million from investors including Thrive Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Its expansion into observability and cloud-native services marks a broader effort to move upmarket and compete for more mainstream enterprise use cases. While ClickHouse still lacks some of the packaged BI and collaboration tools offered by Snowflake, the company is betting that speed and cost advantages will give it a durable foothold.

If ClickHouse closes its next round at the targeted valuation, it will be one of the few private software firms to see a step-up since the peak of the 2021 market.