FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration created on June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Jan 16 (Reuters) - Database management company ClickHouse was valued at $15 billion in its latest funding round, CEO Aaron Katz said on Friday, as investor enthusiasm for companies related to the artificial intelligence boom spills over into the new year.
The firm raised $400 million in a series D round led by Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC and Index Ventures, among others.
In the race to deploy AI tools, companies covet real-time analytics software providers such as ClickHouse that help manage soaring data volumes and performance needs.
"As companies bolt AI features onto everything, they need fast, cheap, real-time analytics for product telemetry, observability, security, and data warehousing in cloud form," said Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Running Point Capital Advisors.
Last month, Databricks, which helps firms manage large amounts of data and build their own AI models, raised more than $4 billion at a valuation of $134 billion, highlighting the sector's momentum.
ClickHouse's technology enables "fast and cheap responses to queries," helping companies run and build AI tools, and competes with players such as Databricks and Snowflake, Schulman said.
"A $15 billion (valuation) implies that the venture round is underwriting a very sharp ramp in ARR, margins and durable retention."
ClickHouse on Friday also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, an open-source platform that helps create, test and monitor large language models.
LLMs are artificial intelligence systems trained on massive amounts of data to generate human-like language.
Founded in 2009, ClickHouse, whose customers include Meta, Cursor, Sony and Tesla, develops open-source database software for real-time analytics.
Its cloud service helps companies quickly analyze large amounts of data for products, monitoring systems and AI-driven applications.
(Reporting by Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Sahal Muhammed)
