ClickHouse, a US-based real-time data company has announced a $350m Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures for its open-source columnar database management system.
New investors BOND, IVP, Battery Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners participated alongside existing backers such as Index Ventures, Lightspeed, GIC, Benchmark, Coatue, FirstMark, and Nebius. This capital injection elevates ClickHouse’s total funding to over $650m.
The funding is earmarked for advancing product development, supporting international expansion, and reinforcing collaborations with customers and technology providers focused on artificial intelligence (AI)-native applications.
Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi said: “We invested in ClickHouse because they’re solving one of the most important infrastructure challenges of this era of AI and agents: enabling real-time data platforms that can support both traditional analytics and the growing demands of AI-native workloads.
“As AI reshapes every industry, the ability to deliver fast, scalable, and cost-efficient analytics is becoming foundational, ClickHouse is poised to become the default engine for next-generation intelligent data products.”
Additionally, ClickHouse secured a $100m credit facility led by Stifel and Goldman Sachs.
Over the past year, ClickHouse claims to have experienced a growth of over 300%, now serving more than 2,000 clients across various sectors including fintech, transportation, consumer goods, and healthcare.
New clients include Anthropic, Tesla, and Mercado Libre of Argentina. They join established clients such as Sony, Meta, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Lyft, Instacart, and others in the AI sector.
This growth reflects a broader industry shift towards real-time intelligent data platforms that serve both human and AI-driven processes, said ClickHouse. With AI agents generating queries at higher speeds than human analysts, there is a demand for databases that can handle low-latency queries with high throughput.
ClickHouse’s high-performance columnar storage engine is designed to meet these requirements, enabling interactive analytical queries on large datasets with minimal delay. This capability supports AI and machine learning (ML) applications, real-time analytics, cloud data warehousing, and observability workloads.
According to ClickHouse, traditional database solutions face challenges in scaling to meet modern analytical demands. Conventional data warehouses are optimised for batch-heavy use cases with limited concurrency. Search-oriented technologies can incur high costs for structured analytics due to increased storage and computational needs.
ClickHouse offers an alternative solution that addresses these needs by combining high-performance analytics with the scalability necessary for current data-driven applications. As an open-source columnar database management system designed for real-time data processing at scale, ClickHouse Cloud is claimed to deliver fast query speed and concurrency.
ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz said: “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.
“But AI is just one driver. We designed and built ClickHouse from day one to support a broad spectrum of real-time data applications across industries, and our momentum reflects that enterprises are hungry for a platform that can keep up with their scaling ambitions.”
