ClickHouse, Inc. is an open-source column-oriented database management system (DBMS) designed for online analytical processing (OLAP) that enables users to generate real-time analytical reports using SQL queries. The project originated at Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company, where Alexey Milovidov and his team started in 2009 to create a database system capable of generating analytical reports from non-aggregated data growing in real time. After three years of development, the system was launched in production in 2012 to power Yandex.Metrica, a major web analytics platform.
In 2016, ClickHouse was released as open-source software under the Apache 2 license, significantly outperforming other systems at the time in terms of throughput and establishing itself as a powerful tool for analytical use cases worldwide. Since then, ClickHouse has gained exponential popularity and is used by leading global companies like Uber, Comcast, eBay, and Cisco. It also supports large-scale scientific projects such as CERN’s LHCb experiment.
Officially incorporated as ClickHouse, Inc. in Delaware in 2021, the company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a subsidiary in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This incorporation aimed to manage the open-source technology with investor backing from firms like Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Coatue Management, and others, raising significant funding rounds and growing rapidly.
ClickHouse prides itself on being a distributed workplace with employees in over 10 countries, emphasizing diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration across time zones and cultures. This global mindset supports their mission to deliver extremely fast data processing and analytics to businesses worldwide.
Today, ClickHouse continues to evolve both its open-source offerings and cloud services to meet the demands of real-time data analytics, backed by a strong community of over 100,000 developers and a broad range of enterprise-level products and services.