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ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

langfuse.com

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Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#81

Post by saberience »

scolvin wrote: post #67
CuriouslyC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it seems a bit forced though. Like why go from an open source utility library for typing to take VC money and try to shoe-horn in an observability platform that no one was asking for?

My prediction, not going to be a good investment.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#82

Post by debarshri »

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…

The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and the new reality for startups.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#83

Post by nikcub »

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…

Clickhouse are on a bit of a roll. acquired peerdb and are doing a hosted postgres product[0]

Acquired hyperdx[1] for their clickstack[2] observability platform and adding langfuse to a bunch of other llm related acquisitions and products

They're really building out a snowflake / databricks alternative

[0] https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres

[1] https://clickhouse.com/docs/cloud/manage/hyperdx

[2] https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#84

Post by data-ottawa »

debarshri wrote: post #82
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…

The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and th…

This has made buying products hard.

What do you do? “We power your agents” okay… but what do you do? How do you do that?

Every DB, storage system, and analytics tool website is like this lately.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#85

Post by weiliddat »

jedberg wrote: post #80
weiliddat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies. Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the…

Thanks for the insight and history. Glad to be corrected.

Was it in a different nature to current VC funded FOSS though? It sounds like their contributions to FOSS was tangential and not the sold product?

Maybe a bit more like Google and Chrome?

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#86

Post by LunaSea »

wodenokoto wrote: post #75
Jgrubb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? because that sentence made my brow wrinkle with confusion. I have thought to myself before that all business data problems eventually become time series problems. I'd like to understand your point of view on how LLMs fit into that.

Time series just means that the order of features matter. Feature 1 occurs before feature 2. E.g, fitting a model to house prices, you don’t care if feature 1 is square meters and feature 2 is time on market, or vice versa, but in a time series, your model changes if you reverse the order of features. With text, the meaning of word 2 is dependent on the meaning of word 1. With stock prices, you expect the price at ti…

As a data structure it is an ordered list of integers but no LLM needs to accès it in a database, it's way to slow for anything serious.

RAG and vector Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) is the the go to use case.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#88

Post by LunaSea »

ushakov wrote: post #4
tuananh wrote: post #3

how does it benefit for clickhouse?

they want to enter the llm observability market and langfuse has already built a convenient wrapper around clickhouse that companies have adopted https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-raises-400-million-se...

Makes no sense to me, there's no synergy between LLMs and databases besides the vector search features.

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#89

Post by hodgesrm »

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...

> 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...

It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.

That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera

Re: ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

#90

Post by hodgesrm »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #30
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.

ClickHouse effectively has a number of personas. Time series is one of them, and ClickHouse has steadily absorbed market share from pure play time series databases over the last few years. Other personas include real-time observability backend (the single biggest use case in my experience) as well as real-time data lake engine. Time series support, column storage, and real-time response are key underlying capabilities. It's quite versatile and fun to use.

Disclosure: I run Altinity, a vendor in this space.

(Update: Disclaimer -> Disclosure. Sigh.)

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