🚨 ClickHouse's net dollar retention is currently above 200%. 20VC just dropped a fantastic new episode with Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse. A must-listen for every $NBIS investor. Here’s my detailed summary: 1) ClickHouse is growing at an insane pace. The revenue trajectory Aaron shared was: $0M → $12M → $50M → $200M → $500M+ expected this year. He believes ClickHouse can reach $1B in ARR before December 2027. 2) The company could go public as early as next year if it wanted to, but there’s no rush. His goal is to build a company that lasts decades, not optimize around the next financing round or IPO window. He also highlighted some of the downsides of being public today, particularly the volatility and the impact that large stock-price moves can have on employees. 3) Net dollar retention is above 200%. That’s mind-blowing. The reason is that customers tend to start with one workload and then expand ClickHouse into others: data warehousing, real-time analytics, observability, customer-facing applications, etc. That expansion dynamic is extremely powerful. Importantly, gross retention is above 99%. 4) ClickHouse now has 4,000+ customers. Some customers spend tens of millions of dollars per year, while he estimates the midpoint production customer is around $100k. Importantly, AI-native companies still represent less than 12% of revenue. So despite ClickHouse being one of the major infrastructure beneficiaries of the AI boom, there appears to be relatively little customer concentration risk. 5) Enterprise adoption is accelerating. Aaron said sales cycles at large enterprises are compressing significantly. Historically, sales cycles into major financial institutions could be measured in years rather than quarters. Now, companies are adopting new technologies much faster. Open source and product-led growth help here because customers can evaluate, deploy and scale ClickHouse without going through a traditional enterprise sales process first. 6) AI agents could massively expand database consumption. Aaron thinks the database requirements of agentic applications are fundamentally different from traditional software. Humans tend to run predictable reports and dashboards. Agents can simultaneously execute dozens of unpredictable queries across multiple systems. That makes three things increasingly important: Latency. Throughput. Efficiency. One example he gave: Tesla is ingesting around 1 billion events per second into ClickHouse. And unlike humans, agents don’t naturally care about limiting consumption. That means query volumes could explode. 7) Eventually, agents may choose the infrastructure themselves. Today, a developer might ask Claude: “What database should I use?” And Claude might recommend ClickHouse. Aaron expects that eventually the agent itself will provision the entire stack: database, networking, compute, storage, etc. In that world, infrastructure companies won’t just be competing for developers. They’ll also be competing to become the default choice of AI agents. ClickHouse is already benefiting from that dynamic. He said Anthropic told them it chose ClickHouse for a specific observability workload after asking Claude which technology it should use. His long-term goal is therefore straightforward: make ClickHouse the default database for applications built by agents, not just humans. 8) AI is accelerating ClickHouse’s own development roadmap. Internally, ClickHouse’s Anthropic usage has increased roughly 100x since the beginning of the year. He said the company is shipping products faster than ever and entering product categories roughly two years earlier than originally planned. His view on AI coding costs is simple: if product velocity and revenue growth keep accelerating, he doesn’t care much about optimizing token spend today. Especially because inference costs should continue declining. 9) ClickHouse probably underinvested in sales. The company has only around 100 quota-carrying salespeople despite operating at hundreds of millions in revenue. Aaron admitted that, looking back, he should have increased sales capacity sooner. Competitors in data warehousing and observability can have thousands of salespeople. ClickHouse intentionally focused on product, engineering and product-led growth first, following something closer to the Datadog playbook than Snowflake’s enterprise-heavy GTM strategy. Now it's layering a larger enterprise sales motion on top. 10) The company is unusually efficient. ClickHouse has close to 800 employees and expects to reach around 1,000 by year-end. Despite that, it's already generating hundreds of millions in revenue with only ~100 quota-carrying salespeople. Aaron said average sales rep productivity is very high relative to the industry. 11) ClickHouse is already a very international business. More than half of revenue comes from outside the US. Roughly 40% from EMEA, 10% from Asia. More than half of customers are also outside North America. ClickHouse is live in 36 regions around the world across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. That global footprint is one reason Aaron believes the company can’t operate from just one or two centralized hubs. 12) ClickHouse is also seeing renewed interest in on-prem infrastructure. Aaron said even some highly innovative digital-native Silicon Valley companies are discussing moving parts of their stack away from hyperscalers and back on-prem. That matters because ClickHouse wants to support multiple deployment models: cloud and on-prem/private environments. His view is that forcing enterprises into one deployment model ultimately limits the addressable market. 13) The moat isn’t simply the open-source database. One common investor concern is: “What stops AWS, Google or Microsoft from just offering ClickHouse themselves?” Aaron acknowledges this risk. His answer is that open-source companies need to maintain proprietary/cloud functionality that's sufficiently difficult to replicate. He also says the competitor he fears most isn’t Snowflake or Databricks. It’s the company that doesn’t exist yet. ClickHouse itself appeared seemingly out of nowhere and disrupted established database vendors. He worries about someone eventually doing the same to ClickHouse. 14) ClickHouse wants to become much broader than an analytical database. The company has already completed six acquisitions in four years. The most recent example mentioned was Langfuse, which pushed ClickHouse further into AI agent observability. His framework is interesting: If ClickHouse can build something internally, let engineering do it. If an exceptional team is already building a product on top of ClickHouse in an area that will eventually belong inside the broader platform, consider acquiring them. The ambition is clearly moving toward becoming a much broader data platform. 15) ClickHouse has a very strong balance sheet. Aaron said the company had around $1B on the balance sheet and didn’t actually need the additional capital from its recent financing. That gives ClickHouse plenty of flexibility to keep investing aggressively in product, hiring, M&A and international expansion. 16) Aaron thinks AI infrastructure revenue is more durable than application-layer revenue. He believes the biggest risk when investing in many AI application companies is revenue durability. Applications can have relatively low switching costs. Infrastructure tends to have much higher switching costs once it becomes deeply integrated into production systems. That's one reason he's skeptical of simply extrapolating hypergrowth at some AI application companies indefinitely. For infrastructure, slower initial adoption can actually produce much more durable revenue later. 17) He definitely doesn’t believe AI is a bubble. When asked for a widely held AI belief he disagrees with, Aaron picked the idea that AI is overhyped or simply another temporary hype cycle. “We’re just getting started.” He lived through internet, mobile and social, and says none of those cycles accelerated as quickly as AI is accelerating today. The combination of AI applications, agents and exploding data consumption could create infrastructure demand unlike anything we’ve seen before. FINAL THOUGHTS ClickHouse is incredibly well positioned to benefit from the surge in data consumption driven by AI agents and increasingly compute-intensive workloads. $NBIS investors shouldn’t assume an IPO is imminent. Aaron said ClickHouse could go public as early as next year, but made it clear there’s no urgency to do so. That might actually be the right decision for long-term value creation. If ClickHouse continues executing at anything close to its current pace, I can clearly see a path toward becoming a $100B+ company over the next few years. Any analyst valuing $NBIS without accounting for its stake in ClickHouse is missing a significant part of the picture.