Comment by rr808
12 hours ago
Just did a funding round. In a sign of the times clickhouse used to be an interesting DB product, but is now a "database software that companies can use as they develop AI agents "
<i>Database technology startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $400 million in a new funding round that values the company at $15 billion — more than double its valuation less than a year ago. </i>
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-16/clickhous...
Clickhouse are on a bit of a roll. acquired peerdb and are doing a hosted postgres product[0]
Acquired hyperdx[1] for their clickstack[2] observability platform and adding langfuse to a bunch of other llm related acquisitions and products
They're really building out a snowflake / databricks alternative
[0] https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres
[1] https://clickhouse.com/docs/cloud/manage/hyperdx
[2] https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability
Investors are finicky creatures, if you've been relying on VC-funding since before, it's hard to stop until you are really successful, and if everyone starts to only look at shiny AI stuff and you still need investors, you end up with not much choice.
I wish there was less of it, we'd have better software then, but :/
What but? If this is the "best" that VC can do with the money, the US government should simply tax it away from them. Absolutely worse way to allocate resources and develop a robust forward looking tech industry, you're just chasing the shiny while fucking over the commons.
Maybe my point wasn't clear, I agree with you. It's a bad way of allocating resources, and we'd had better software had we been without it.
Would we? You can look at places with less funding and see how many software companies get off the ground.
> You can look at places with less funding
Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.
I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".
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I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.
They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.
Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.
The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and the new reality for startups.
This has made buying products hard.
What do you do? “We power your agents” okay… but what do you do? How do you do that?
Every DB, storage system, and analytics tool website is like this lately.
I think it’s hard to make money as a pure play DB vendor and has been for a decade or two. So they all inevitably pivot into some service specific to whatever the hot use case of the moment is… Cybersecurity. Observability. Crypto. AI.