ClickHouse acquires Langfuse • Hacker News Board

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#21

Post by michaelmior » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

gyre007 wrote: post #17

> Our goal continues to be building the best LLM engineering platform Interesting headline for a checks notes time series database company.

Note that the headline is from Langfuse, not ClickHouse. Reading the announcement from ClickHouse[0], the headline is "ClickHouse welcomes Langfuse: The future of open-source LLM observability". I think the Langfuse team is suggesting that they will be continuing to do the same work within ClickHouse, not that the entire ClickHouse organization has a goal of building the best LLM engineering platform.

[0] https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-acquires-langfuse-ope...

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#22

Post by pprotas » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:36 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #8

the "Prompt Management" part of these products always seemed odd. Does anyone use it? Why?

Iterating on LLM agents involves testing on production(-like) data. The most accurate way to see whether your agent is performing well is to see it working on production.

You want to see the best results you can get from a prompt, so you use features like prompt management an A/B testing to see what version of your prompt performs better (i.e. is fit to the model you are using) on production.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#23

Post by rr808 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

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 "

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.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-16/clickhous...

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#24

Post by cs554 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

gyre007 wrote: post #17

> Our goal continues to be building the best LLM engineering platform Interesting headline for a checks notes time series database company.

"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company" is a weird thing for a textile manufacturer to call itself. Almost like...businesses expand and evolve?

(they've never been a time series database company either lol)

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#25

Post by 7thpower » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #18

shmichael wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without the purchase price, it is unclear whether this deserves congratulations or condolences. Two years in the LLM race will have definitely depleted their seed raise of $4m from 2023, and with no news of additional funds raised it's more than likely this was a fire sale.

Anecdotally, from the AI startup scene in London, I do not know folks who swear by Langfuse. Honestly, evals platforms are still only just starting to catch on. I haven't used any tracing/monitoring tools for LLMs that made me feel like, say, Honeycomb does.

I love langfuse, it is my goto.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#26

Post by wodenokoto » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

gyre007 wrote: post #17

> Our goal continues to be building the best LLM engineering platform Interesting headline for a checks notes time series database company.

Language models are time series models.

It’s great when you get this insight as a student of NLP, because suddenly your toolset grows quite a bit.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#27

Post by 7thpower » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

Langfuse has been my favorite LLM observability solution so far. Hopefully this acquisition makes it better, not worse.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#28

Post by jascha_eng » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

shmichael wrote: post #16

bezbac wrote: post #7

Congratulations to everyone involved, quite remarkable considering Langfuse was only founded as part of YC 23.

Without the purchase price, it is unclear whether this deserves congratulations or condolences. Two years in the LLM race will have definitely depleted their seed raise of $4m from 2023, and with no news of additional funds raised it's more than likely this was a fire sale.

It was not a fire sale I'm pretty sure. Langfuse has been consistently growing, they publish some stats about sdk usage etc so you can look that up.

They also say in the announcement that they had a term sheet for a good series a.

I think the team just took the chance to exit early before the llm hype crashes down. There is also a question of how big this market really is they mostly do observability for chatbots but there are only so many of those and with other players like openais tracing, pydantic logfire, posthog etc they become more a feature than a product of its own. Without a great distribution system they would eventually fall behind I think.

2 years to a decent exit (probably 100m cash out or so with a good chunk being Clickhouse shares) seems like a good idea rather than betting on that story to continue forever.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#29

Post by CuriouslyC » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

As a big Clickhouse fan, agent evals are where their product really shines. They're buying into market segment where their product is succeeding so they can vertically integrate and tighten up the feedback loop.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#30

Post by dangoodmanUT » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

gyre007 wrote: post #17

> Our goal continues to be building the best LLM engineering platform Interesting headline for a checks notes time series database company.

Your notes aren't very good. They're not a time series database company, they're a columnar database company. But yeah the LLM bit is weird, database companies _always_ feel like charlatans when it comes to LLMs.