Earlier this week Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian digital giant, announced the incorporation of ClickHouse as a legal entity. This spinoff aims to provide commercial impetus to what was so far essentially a community-led open source activity around distributed database management systems (DBMS).
Under plans, new commercial products will be developed — including, for example, a cloud-based version of DBMS and other solutions for large businesses.
ClickHouse’s technology was first developed more than 10 years ago. The initial purpose was to power Yandex.Metrica, the in-house web analytics platform.
“The power and utility of [this technology] was immediately clear; by offering a true column-based DBMS, it allowed for systems to generate reports from petabytes of raw data with sub-second latencies,” says Yandex. “While the systems at the time offered a server throughput of 100,000 rows per second, ClickHouse increased that speed to hundreds of millions of rows per second.”
In 2016, ClickHouse was made available as an open source solution. Since then, its popularity has grown “exponentially,” with use cases involving such tech giants as Alibaba, Cisco, Comcast, eBay, Spotify, Tencent, Tesla and Uber. ClickHouse today is the 45th most popular DBMS in the world, according to the DB-Engines ranking cited by Yandex.
To fund the new company, Yandex has partnered with Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures, two major US venture funds. ClickHouse has received a $50 million capital injection, with the two funds leading the round in undisclosed proportions.
Justifying the involvement of these funds, Yandex underlined their “proven track record of building successful companies based on cloud technologies and open-source products,” citing such examples as Cockroach Labs, Confluent, Docker, Elastic, Hortonworks and MySQL AB.
