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ClickHouse raises $350M Series C
- bananapub 1y agooof, that sucks [for everyone else]. I hope someone figures out how to make a sustainable business of this sort, eventually.
- candiddevmike 1y agoBeing a profitable database vendor is really, really hard. You absolutely have to lock down big customers during your hype cycle or you're done for. The time to value for customers is so long, it becomes such an investment and sales cycles become really laborious (as a former DB SE in the past).
- hodgesrm 1y agoOr you focus on cost-efficient operation from very the beginning. Ironically databases are also one of the markets where it's possible to achieve profitability operating, extending, or supporting open source software. I did a talk at FOSDEM 2025 about how three specific companies (Percona, DBeaver, Altinity) achieved this. [0] It is possible because businesses depend on databases and are willing to pay real money to ensure they work properly. [0] https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5320-build-a-great-business-on-open-source-without-selling-your-soul/ https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5320-buil... Disclaimer: I run Altinity.
- datavirtue 1y agoYep, there will be an alternatives on Azure and AWS soon enough, if not already.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoI love clickhouse and a lot of the team members, but some of the "ClickHouse, Inc." people seem very counter to the original mission of CH, which has been unfortunately been reflected in some negative ways to both the overall OLAP ecosystem, and clickhouse itself. I've shared many of those thoughts with their team directly out of love. Also that's Series D-E, money isn't real anymore
- jasonjmcghee 1y agoDepends on trajectory and capital need among other things. There are series B this size.
- Octoth0rpe 1y ago> Also that's Series D-E, money isn't real anymore Could you explain this? Is this commentary on voting power dilution or their class a/b share rules?
- ko_pivot 1y agoI’m guessing what they mean is that the valuation is so inflated at this point that the high dollar amount more reflects the likelihood of acquisition or IPO in the near term rather than some sort of substantive demonstration of confidence in the company and its founders.
- mooreds 1y agoNot OP, but I took it to mean that the round was absurdly large. The norms/expectations around size of rounds are not what they once were. I had the same thought the first time I heard about a 12M "seed" round.
- PeterZaitsev 1y agoWhat differences from original mission do you see ?
- nasretdinov 1y agoI personally see ClickHouse still improving in terms of overall usability and becoming much more polished, introducing features like full-text indexing, JSON data type, etc, all open-source and completely free. The commercial offering deviates from the "bare-bones", "build-it-yourself" storage, but, again, in my opinion it makes perfect sense to commercialise this part of it, to allow the product overall to continue to evolve and be successful. Otherwise ClickHouse as an open-source database probably wouldn't be able to evolve so quickly since the needs of Yandex don't always align with the needs of other users of the database
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- quantumwoke 1y agoIs this money for growth or exiting employee options?
- vb-8448 1y agoI'm wondering why ClickHouse need to raise more money? Aren't they profitable already?
- jedberg 1y agoUsually by Series C, you're at a point where you could be breakeven or profitable, but it's because you're tackling a huge market with a lot of opportunities, so it makes sense to take on capital to accelerate growth to attack that market.
- amazingamazing 1y agoHow hard is it to self host clustered clickhouse? Is there parity with the hosted offering?
- nasretdinov 1y agoIt's quite easy to host your own instance, we've done it ~7 years ago and had a cluster of over 50 nodes without any major issues. What ClickHouse Cloud offers is "shared nothing" storage, via SharedMergeTree that has S3 as a backing store, and it allows to scale storage and compute separately. The implementation is closed source.
- amazingamazing 1y agoInteresting - hardware is so cheap though, I guess most enterprises don’t want the hassle. Personally I’d just go to a colo center buy a rack of super micro and call it a day. No way that’s more expensive after a year (per public pricing).
- nasretdinov 1y agoSharding in Open-Source version isn't automatic, so you have to manage it yourself, as in there is no automatic resharding and you need to insert data accordingly. IMO that's the biggest bottleneck in its adoption at larger scale. Previously you didn't have a choice in terms of whether or not to do sharding (and compute/storage separation if you want it), now you have more options, including one from ClickHouse authors themselves.
- nine_k 1y agoApparently it's not a bottleneck, it's a sales funnel.
- nasretdinov 1y agoI don't see a contradiction here tbh. There's nothing wrong in not providing some extra functionality for free (especially for features that users will pay for). If you have engineering resources to manage sharding manually you're welcome to do so. Since ClickHouse is a commercial company and not part of Yandex they need to earn money one way or another to fund the database development.
- the__alchemist 1y agoIs there an ELI5 for this company? I'm having a difficult time understanding it from their website. Is it an alternative to Postgres etc? Something that runs on top of it? And analyzes your DB automatically?
- doix 1y agoI guess you could say it's an alternative to postgres. It's a different database, that's column oriented which makes different tradeoffs. I'd say DuckDB is a better comparison, if you're familiar with it.
- pythonaut_16 1y agoExpanding for the original question: Roughly speaking, Postgres is to SQLite what Clickhouse is to DuckDB. OLTP -> Online Transaction Processing. Postgres and traditional RDBMS. Mainly focused on transactions and addressing specific rows. Queries like "show me all orders for customer X". OLAP -> Online Analytical Processing. Clickhouse and other columnar oriented. For analytical and calculation queries, like "show me the total value of all orders in March 2024". OLTP database typically store data by column rather than row, and usually have optimizations for storage space and query speed based on that. As a tradeoff they're typically slower for OLTP type queries. Often you'd bring in an OLAP db like Clickhouse when you have a huge volume of data and your OLTP database is struggling to keep up.
- ksynwa 1y agoWhat's the significance of "online" in these acronyms?
- edoceo 1y agoLive and real-time
- stonemetal12 1y agoIt is a rather old acronym. The other option was batch processing, you will get your results in the mail type thing. Here "Online" means results while connected to the system, not real time since there is no time requirement for results.
- whiskeytwolima 1y agoI honestly just want to know why they didn't steam their shirts.
- winterbloom 1y agoso like iron? is it that important? asking legitimately
- whiskeytwolima 1y agoNah I don't think it's important. I just think it's funny.
- ajcp 1y agoI'm really confused by the wrinkle pattern. Were they stored with half the shirt stuffed in a Pringles can? Or were these shot out of a air-cannon? The more I look at the picture the deeper the mystery gets.
- tylerhannan 1y agoI actually took that picture a few years ago. It's a fun story. Our first swag shipment with the new colours had just arrived, the founders were in one place together for one of the first times, the weather wasn't terrible in Amsterdam for one day. Not a pringles can. Rather they were stuffed in a shipping box that came from a warehouse, manhandled by customs, and thrown onto them for the purpose of taking the photo. #startuplife eh?
- whiskeytwolima 1y agoLove it, and I've definitely been there. Too funny though.
- devops000 1y agoonly 2k users? with 200$/month I have a good database. $1-5M revenue?
- arecurrence 1y agoI've worked at a number of companies using Clickhouse and they all self-hosted. I imagine Clickhouse corporate is focused on large customers.
- noleary 1y agoMy understanding is that those 2,000 represent some very large and enterprise-y contracts. The GitHub itself has almost 2,000 contributors: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse
- brettgriffin 1y agothe ACV for a data warehouse is orders of magnitude beyond $200. Snowflake's ACV is something like $300k/yr
- wooque 1y agowe use smallest cluster and it's $450/month, most companies probably pay much more.
- Boxxed 1y agoDoes anyone use clickhouse in production? I was initially pretty impressed but when I really put it through its paces I could OoM it as soon as I actually started querying non-trivial amounts of data: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/79064 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/79064
- hodgesrm 1y agoIt's used in production by many thousands of companies at this point. The ClickHouse Inc numbers are just a fraction of the total users. p.s., It's also possible to break ClickHouse as you demonstrated. It used to be a lot easier.
- Boxxed 1y agoI guess I'm curious how; I breathe on it wrong and it OoMs.
- bathtub365 1y agoYou don’t need a good product to have a lot of users, just good marketing and salespeople.
- nasretdinov 1y agoOne easy way to achieve this is to store really large values, e.g. 10 Mb per row. Since ClickHouse operates in large blocks you'd easily cause an OOM just by trying to read chunks of 8192 rows (the default) at a time, especially during merges, where it needs to read large blocks from several parts at once
- hodgesrm 1y agoOne of the tradeoffs for ClickHouse versus databases like Snowflake is that you have to have some knowledge about the internals to use it effectively. For example, Snowflake completely hides partitioning but on the other hand it does not deliver consistent, real-time response the way a well-tuned ClickHouse application can. When you use INSERT ... SELECT in ClickHouse you do need to pay attention to the generated table partitions, as they coexist in memory before flushing to storage. The usual approach is to break up the insert into chunks so you can control how many parts are generated or to adjust the partitioning in the target table. It's possible the problem might be somehow related to this behavior but that's just conjecture. It's usually pretty easy to work around. Meanwhile if it's a bug it will probably get fixed quickly.
- bbohan 1y ago[flagged]