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
