ClickHouse Valued at $2 Billion in Round After Yandex Spinout

(Bloomberg) -- Online analytics startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $250 million in new funding at a $2 billion valuation.

The database management business, which was started at Russian web giant Yandex NV, was spun out of that firm and incorporated. Yandex remains an investor in San Francisco-based ClickHouse and retains two board seats.

The financing round was led by Coatue and Altimeter, with participation from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint, among others, said ClickHouse Chief Executive Officer Aaron Katz.

Even before generating revenue, ClickHouse has gained traction as an open-source tool that the company believes can be monetized, said Katz, who was previously chief revenue officer at data analytics firm Elastic NV. Acknowledging that data analytics is a crowded market, Katz said in an interview that he expects ClickHouse will be able to improve speed and efficiency for businesses.

Caryn Marooney, general partner at Coatue, said she invested because “a solution is needed for real-time analytics with millisecond latency.” She said that Coatue was following the project for years, before it became an independent business.

Index Ventures is investing because “people are using a lot more data to run their businesses than they used to before,” said Mike Volpi, a partner at the firm.

What distinguishes ClickHouse from its competition is that it can “very quickly visualize” database information, Volpi said.

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