Investing in Clickhouse - The Fastest Data Warehouse
I'm excited to announce that I've invested in ClickHouse's $350 million Series C round.
Two years ago at the Goldman Sachs Private Innovative Company Conference (PICC), one particular presentation stood out to me. Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse, took the stage and introduced me to a concept I'd never heard before: the "real-time database."
Here’s a few snapshots from that presentation that caught my eye…
That moment sparked a deep dive into what I recognized as an emerging trend in cloud infrastructure. I wrote about this opportunity last summer, exploring how real-time analytics was becoming a critical competitive advantage for modern enterprises.
I'm excited to announce that I've invested in ClickHouse's $350 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from BOND, IVP, Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and existing investors including Index Ventures, Lightspeed, GIC, Benchmark, Coatue, FirstMark, and Nebius.
The Momentum is Undeniable
The numbers tell a compelling story. ClickHouse grew over 300% in the past year and now serves more than 2,000 customers across industries from fintech to healthcare. Recent customer wins include Anthropic, Tesla, and Argentina's Mercado Libre, joining an impressive roster that includes Sony, Meta, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Lyft, Instacart, and AI innovators like Sierra, Poolside, Weights & Biases, and LangChain.
But beyond the growth metrics, what excites me is the fundamental shift ClickHouse represents in how enterprises handle data.
The Investment Thesis: Why Now?
My decision to invest stems from macro trends and company-specific execution. I believe we’re at an inflection point where traditional data infrastructure is breaking under the weight of modern demands.
The Problem: Legacy Tools Can't Keep Up
Every major technology wave….cloud, mobile, and now AI….. generates massive data explosions. The challenge is that most enterprises are still relying on tools designed for a different era.
Traditional databases like Snowflake & Redshift were architected for batch processing, where data is collected, cleaned, and analyzed hours or days after the fact. This approach worked fine when businesses could afford to wait for insights.
But today's applications demand real-time decisions in milliseconds. Whether it's fraud detection, AI monitoring, or dynamic personalization, the window for action has collapsed. Companies using legacy tools face an impossible choice: spend enormous amounts on hyperscaler compute or accept delays that hurt business outcomes.
The current stack is also fractured and expensive—one tool for logs, another for analytics, another for AI search. Each adds complexity and cost.
The core pain point: Enterprises need to make real-time decisions on streaming data without spending like hyperscalers, and existing tools weren't designed for this reality.
The Solution: A New Breed of Database
What makes ClickHouse truly differentiated is how it unifies three critical capabilities into one engine:
Real-time ingestion of streaming data
High-speed querying for instant insights
AI/vector search capabilities for modern applications
Instead of stitching together Snowflake + Splunk + Pinecone, companies can use ClickHouse alone—with 3-5x faster performance and 50-70% lower costs.
Broad and Sticky Use Cases
The applications are diverse and mission-critical:
Fraud detection in fintech
AI observability (Even OpenAI relies on ClickHouse!!!)
E-commerce personalization (Walmart uses it for real-time recommendations)
Real-time ad analytics (Microsoft Ads processes billions of events…. Clickhouse is so good, even Microsoft is a customer)
The AI Catalyst
As CEO Aaron Katz noted in the Series C announcement: "As AI agents proliferate across data-driven applications, observability, data infrastructure, and beyond, the demand for agent-facing databases like ClickHouse has reached an inflection point. The future of analytics isn't just dashboards. It's intelligent agents that interpret data, trigger workflows, and power real-time decisions."
AI is accelerating the need for real-time data infrastructure. AI agents need to observe, learn, and act on data streams in real-time. Traditional batch processing creates a fundamental mismatch with how AI systems need to operate.
Why I'm Excited
ClickHouse isn't just faster than existing solutions—it's simpler, cheaper, and more adaptable to the demands of AI-driven businesses. In a world where data volumes are exploding and response time expectations are collapsing, that combination is incredibly powerful.
The company is positioned at the intersection of multiple massive trends: the explosion of real-time data, the rise of AI agents, and enterprises' need to reduce infrastructure complexity and costs. That's a rare and valuable position.
I'm thrilled to be a small part of ClickHouse's journey as they continue to redefine what's possible with real-time data infrastructure.