ClickHouse at $160M ARR
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Built inside the “Google of Russia” Yandex to power real-time analytics, ClickHouse has carved out a distinct niche from Snowflake and Databricks by going after latency-sensitive workloads, winning engineering-centric companies like Ramp, GitLab, and Statsig as a 10-20x cheaper replacement for Elasticsearch or Datadog. Sacra estimates ClickHouse hit $160M in ARR by the end of 2025, growing 256% year-over-year, valued at $15B following a $400M Series D in January 2026. For more, check out our full report and dataset on ClickHouse.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- Built at Yandex in 2009 to power Russia's Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, ClickHouse (founded 2021) was built as a clickstream data warehouse designed for extremely large, append-only event datasets (e.g., user clicks, pageviews etc) to make it easy for developers to build user-facing, real-time analytics dashboards & experiences, much faster than using an app-DB like Postgres and faster & cheaper than a data warehouse like Snowflake & Databricks. Not unlike Manus’s redomiciling from China, ClickHouse was spun out from Yandex in 2021 as a standalone company backed by Benchmark & Index, with its Russian team relocating to Amsterdam—after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Dutch-domiciled parent of Yandex (an investor in ClickHouse) sold its Russian assets for $5.4B to a consortium of Russian investors and rebranded as Nebius.
- With widespread open source adoption (46K GitHub stars) particularly across top SaaS companies with user-facing analytics products & dashboards like Posthog (product analytics), Braze (customer engagement analytics) and Ramp (spend reporting), ClickHouse monetizes via its managed service ClickHouse Cloud (launched in 2022) through usage-based pricing on storage ($25/TB/month) and compute ($0.22–$0.39/unit/hour) across three tiers, with Sacra estimating ClickHouse hit $160M ARR by the end of 2025, growing 256% year-over-year, raising a $400M Series D led by Dragoneer at a $15B valuation for a ~94x revenue multiple. Compare to cloud data warehouse Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) at ~$4.4B revenue, up 29% YoY, trading at ~$55B for a 12.5x multiple, cloud data lakehouse Databricks at $5.4B ARR, up 65% YoY, valued at $134B for a ~24.8x multiple, and observability giants Elastic at $1.6B revenue, up 17% YoY, at ~$6B for a 3.8x multiple and Datadog at $3.43B revenue, up 28% YoY, trading at ~$36.6B for a ~10.6x multiple.
- The embedded-analytics value prop—real-time speed at lower cost per query—gives ClickHouse a foothold in log analysis & observability as a 10–20x cheaper alternative to Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Datadog, with the opportunity to convert self-hosted, open source users like AstraZeneca & Sony to ClickHouse Cloud hinging on enterprise readiness & closing the gap in compliance features like role-based access control, audit trails, and regulatory reporting. In 2024, Apache Iceberg had its “VHS moment”, with customer demand pushing Databricks & Snowflake to publicly support the open table format, a standardization that stands to weaken warehouse lock-in at the storage-format layer and give tools like ClickHouse the opening to drive adoption without requiring database migrations.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Product manager at Firebolt on on scaling challenges and ACID compliance in OLAP databases
- AI program manager at AstraZeneca on running self-hosted ClickHouse
- Tristan Handy, CEO of dbt Labs, on dbt’s multi-cloud tailwinds
- Conor McCarter, co-founder of Prequel, on Fivetran's existential risk
- Databricks at $4.8B ARR
- Charles Chretien, co-founder of Prequel, on the modern data stack’s ROI problem
- Leah Weiss, co-founder of Preql, on delivering clean data to LLMs
- dbt Labs vs Databricks vs Snowflake
- Cribl at $200M ARR
- Grafana at $270M/year growing 69%
- Cribl: the $120M/year Ramp of data observability
- PostHog: the $9.5M/year anti modern data stack company
Read more from
Read more from
Read more from
Vibe coding's backend
Free Report
Continue Reading
Mintlify revenue, growth, and valuation
Unlocked Report
Continue Reading
