Real-Time Data for the AI Era: ClickHouse Enters Its Next Chapter With $350M Series C

By Mike Volpi

When we first partnered with ClickHouse in 2021, it already had a devoted following. Born as an open-source project inside one of the world’s largest internet companies, it had quietly earned a reputation as the database for engineers solving some of the hardest problems in analytics. It was fast, efficient, and deeply loved by the people who know databases best.

The four years since have played out like the rise of a breakout indie hit. What started as a hidden gem has become a full-blown box-office smash. It’s one part A Beautiful Mind—Alexey’s vision of a blazing-fast analytical database that could scale elegantly to petabyte workloads; one part Good Will Hunting—an underdog hiding in plain sight, now, with the backing to prove what it could do; and one part Mission: Impossible—a feat of high-speed execution, rearchitecting the system from the ground up, launching ClickHouse Cloud in a year, and scaling the company globally across engineering, go-to-market, and customer success.

What’s impressed me most is the team’s single-minded focus and willingness to take the harder path. Aaron, Alexey, and Yury could have gone the conventional route, offering an “enterprise edition” to self-hosted users and easing into the cloud over time. Instead, they went straight to the endgame, taking what Aaron learned at Salesforce and going all-in on ClickHouse Cloud. That meant rebuilding the architecture into a true cloud-native platform, supporting multi-tenancy, elasticity, and a serverless experience. It took longer to get to a sellable product, but the result is a solution that works as well for a solo developer as it does for a global enterprise.

That foundation enabled a growth engine that was obvious within the first six months of launch. ClickHouse now serves more than 2,000 customers across industries like fintech, healthcare, consumer, transportation, and AI. Recent additions include Anthropic, Tesla, and Mercado Libre, alongside early adopters like Sony, Meta, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Lyft, and Netflix. The company’s product-led growth model makes it easy for developers to start small, explore freely, and scale quickly. And the expansion dynamics are extraordinary. Customers who start with a $10K spend often grow into $500K accounts as they expand their use cases and experience the incredible value the platform provides. That steady growth, fueled by real usage rather than heavy sales, is a testament to the clarity of vision behind the product—and it’s matched by a sustained product velocity that, frankly, is rare once companies reach this scale.

Aaron and the team were adamant from the start about focusing on developers first and letting product-led growth drive everything else. While others (including yours truly) encouraged them to lean harder into enterprise sales and land bigger Fortune 500 logos, they stayed the course, confident that adoption would follow if they built something developers genuinely loved. And they were right. Today, ClickHouse is seeing both bottom-up traction across thousands of users and growing demand from some of the world’s largest companies.

As AI moves from research to production, the opportunity for ClickHouse grows by the day. AI agents can issue queries faster and at much higher volume than human users. That means the infrastructure behind modern AI applications needs to support real-time, high-throughput analytics—something traditional databases and warehouses weren’t built for. ClickHouse, by contrast, was designed from day one to handle interactive analytical workloads at scale. It’s already supporting AI-native companies like LangChain, Weights & Biases, Poolside, and Sierra as they build faster, more responsive applications with real-time demands.

And the AI story doesn’t stop there. As more enterprises look to feed proprietary data into AI workflows, they need a reliable, efficient, and secure place to store that information. ClickHouse is uniquely positioned as the store of record for the high-value, confidential data that powers internal AI applications. It’s fast. It’s scalable. And it already supports vector search and other capabilities that matter in this new landscape.

Of course, this is about more than AI. The demand for real-time analytics continues to surge across sectors. ClickHouse started as the “clickstream data warehouse,” designed for the high-volume user events that power product analytics. But it’s quickly expanded into adjacent categories like observability, where machine-generated logs need to be ingested and queried in real time, and cloud data warehousing, where complex joins and transformations are common. These are large, adjacent markets where ClickHouse is increasingly competitive on performance, flexibility, and cost.

With the company's $350M Series C announcement, we’re excited to support ClickHouse again as they enter their next exciting phase of growth. This capital will be used to accelerate product development, support global expansion, and deepen partnerships with customers and technology providers building the next wave of AI-native applications.

Congratulations to Aaron, Alexey, Yury, and the outstanding ClickHouse team. We’re proud to be your partners and can’t wait to see what you do from here.