ClickHouse acquires Langfuse • Hacker News Board

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#61

Post by deaux » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

kankerlijer wrote: post #33

For those building applications with Langfuse and Clickhouse - do you like these products? I get the odd request to do an AI thing, and my previous experience with LLM wrappers convinced me to stay away from them (Langchain, Llamaindex, Autogen, others). In some cases they were poorly written, and in other ways the march of progress rendered their tooling irrelevant fairly quickly. Are these better?

Ive used Langfuse. It's completely unrelated to tools like Langchain and Autogen. It's just logging/tracing for LLMs. Sure they added stuff like "prompt management" and "epxeriments" etc. probably to keep investors happy but those are entirely optional sidedishes.

The tools you mentioned are indeed to be avoided. I trialed them early on and quickly realized in 99.9% they do nothing but bog you down. Pretty sure they'll be dead sooner rather than later.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#62

Post by deaux » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

amai wrote: post #54

Since clickhouse is headquartered in the US that means the langfuse cloud is no longer GDPR compliant.

Correct! Will be moving away immediately for this reason.

Or well, technically incorrect, as someone will surely point out. US companies can be legally compliant with GDPR, it's just that the likes of the CLOUD Act and FISA make it completely meaningless.

Before anyone comes in talking about how it's farfetched that those matter, it's 100x as far-fetched that self-hosted Chinese LLM models would exfiltrate your data (you can even airgap them) yet 90% of corporate America is avoiding them based solely on the country they were trained in. Compared to that insanity, above US acts are a very real threat.

And that's of course on top of that now an adversarial state's company has the power to immediately dissolve Langfuse.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#63

Post by steveBK123 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

rr808 wrote: post #23

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/cli…

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.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#64

Post by deaux » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

Very sad, for all their marketing around EU, GDPR, privacy and so on. I feel dumb for having fell for it a little.

This is a big reason why there are so few EU tech startups, they get bought out if they're doing well, more and more consolidation in tech, more and more "exits".

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#65

Post by axpy906 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

antoniojtorres wrote: post #55

axpy906 wrote: post #53

SaaS company pivots to AI. Gets funding rebranded as AI company. Buys a company that actually knows it. It’s still early but I question how much of these SaaS companies will continue. I’d rather connect Claude or whatever to do my task than have to learn a new platform let alone login to it.

I don’t think that is a an accurate depiction of ClickHouse. I don’t think they’re pivoting from their main data warehousing product at all. Probably making their cloud offering more competitive with other providers.

I haven’t used their product so you’re probably right. I’m biased as an AI engineer because I get contacted to help implement AI in existing platforms. While I admire the pivot the reality is what they have is already quite behind. Anything I make these days is old in about three months… You’d ideally want to start fresh and not have to worry about codebase that is years old.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#66

Post by topicseed » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:39 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'd say out of many generative AI observability platforms, Langsmith and Weave (Weights&Biases) are probably the ones most enterprises use, but there's definitely space for Langfuse, Modelmetry, Arize AI, and other players.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#67

Post by scolvin » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #32

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #14

I predict it will be Pydantic next to get picked up by someone for logfire and agent framework.... fine as long as all these open source projects stay open source then good for them

The Pydantic stuff is nice, but in a minimalist way that I don't see being amenable to SaaS/vc/etc.

We have a SaaS platform (Pydantic Logfire - General and AI observability), and we raised our Series A from Sequoia.

For good or bad, I think we're pretty "SaaS/vc/etc." already.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#68

Post by mrits » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:03 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.

They are closer to an LLM database than a time series database. But they aren't very close to either.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#69

Post by esafak » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

hrimfaxi wrote: post #45

esafak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.

What gave you that idea?

Because Silicon Valley, which contributes the majority of the code, is venture backed. For example, 84% of the Linux kernel's development is corporate: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-foundation-growth-...

I don't know why people are so upset here.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#70

Post by rhplus » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

weiliddat wrote: post #46

esafak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.

That sounds like more sign of recent times. FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.

I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.

Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.