Accelerating enterprise transformation toward high-performance analytics with ClickHouse
Bessemer Venture Partners invests in ClickHouse Inc's Series C as the company rapidly transforms the enterprise data infrastructure landscape.
Janelle Teng Wade, Byron Deeter & Sam Bondy
Published on May 29, 2025
At Bessemer, we strongly believe that authentic user evangelism is one of the most powerful forces in fueling the rise of the next category-defining, developer-centric business. In a world where developers have more choices today than ever before, it takes a very special company to not only earn adoption, but sustain grassroots endorsement over time. Throughout the years of roadmapping the AI infrastructure and data infrastructure landscape, we kept hearing of ClickHouse, a project that quickly captured the attention of developers like lightning in a bottle.
The future of data infrastructure is already here
Data is growing exponentially, not just in volume, but in velocity and variety—pushing the limits on current infrastructure tooling. The volume of generated data, especially unstructured data, is projected to skyrocket by 2030, driven by the wave of ML/AI excitement and synthetic data produced by generative models across all modalities.
ClickHouse Inc is rising to the challenge of building the backbone of enterprise data infrastructure with its open-source online analytical processing (OLAP) database—enabling ultra-fast analytics processing on massive datasets. That’s why we’re thrilled to back ClickHouse in their Series C funding as AI innovation catalyzes an evolution in data infrastructure across many vectors. With over 40,000 stars, ClickHouse is wildly popular—being praised as the fastest OLAP database and easy to deploy by a variety of developers.
Why we invested
While all the effusive feedback for ClickHouse across global channels caught our eye, it was the advocacy from our own portfolio companies—many in real-time domains like AI and cyber are built on ClickHouse—that reinforced to us ClickHouse’s true magic. It’s a core technology empowering new businesses that rely on immediate data-driven decision making to exist and thrive by delivering unprecedented speed, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Enterprises also experience ClickHouse’s transformative power with the platform unlocking the modernization of tech stacks across analytics, warehousing, and observability, enabling lower latency at a more efficient scale.
ClickHouse was first developed at Yandex by Alexey Milovidov and then open-sourced in 2016. Co-founders Aaron Katz and Yury Izrailevsky joined forces with Milovidov bringing along years of enterprise sales and engineering experience from Elastic, Google, Netflix, and Salesforce. Now, as one of the most popular open-source databases in the world, ClickHouse is leveraged by Fortune 500 companies and early-stage startups alike.
We've confidently partnered with ClickHouse’s founders and their exceptional team as they transform the data infrastructure landscape by enabling global organizations to access faster queries without skyrocketing costs. This is an endeavor that doesn’t just require world-class technical expertise, but also a visionary product eye and deep developer empathy. We couldn’t think of a more fitting founding team to be pursuing this mission and are excited to see ClickHouse usher in the next generation of enterprise data infrastructure, purpose-built for the AI age.
Contributors
Janelle Teng Wade
Partner
Janelle Teng Wade is a partner at Bessemer where she leads the firm’s early-stage investment roadmaps in AI/ML, data infrastructure, developer platforms, and defense tech. She is passionate about supporting highly technical teams and founders from research backgrounds pushing on the technological frontier.
Before joining Bessemer, Janelle was a product manager at SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ) where she led mobile development for Salesforce Inbox and was one of the inventors of Einstein Email Insights. She began her career as a business analyst at McKinsey and Company.
A science enthusiast at heart, Janelle studied biology and economics at Stanford University, where she graduated with academic distinction and departmental honors. She also earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. Outside of work, you can find Janelle skiing, hiking, or writing her Substack.
Byron Deeter
Partner
Byron Deeter is a leading investor in AI, Cloud, Frontier Technology, and the Business of Sports. He co-authored Bessemer’s iconic 10 Laws of Cloud Computing, the Bessemer Forbes Cloud 100, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, and Bessemer’s STRIVE program for executive health and wellness. Byron works closely alongside many of the best founders in the cloud world, with 26 of Byron’s investments currently valued above $1 billion each, including 13 IPOs and counting.
Byron first raised a Series A with Bessemer back in 2000, as CEO and founder of Trigo Technologies. His company grew to be one of the first global SaaS companies, reaching profitability and was successfully sold to IBM. Byron foresaw that cloud computing would not only change the way people built new technologies but also how The Cloud would systematically run the world. In 2005, Byron returned to Bessemer, this time to help lead the firm’s global cloud practice.
Byron graduated with honors from The University of California, Berkeley, where he met his then college sweetheart and now wife. Byron is a perennial Midas List investor, past Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, partner/owner of the San Francisco 49ers and Leeds United, as well as an active board member/advisor to numerous causes including the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Foundation, U.C. Berkeley Foundation, Pledge 1% and Cal Rugby. Although he’s a four-time Rugby Collegiate National Champion and serial Ironman finisher, he’s largely converted to leisure sports of golf, wake surfing, and skiing with his wife and three children.
Sam Bondy
Vice President
Sam is a vice president based out of San Francisco and primarily focuses on early and growth stage cloud and AI.
Prior to venture capital, Sam began his career in Technology, Media, and Telecommunications investment banking at J.P. Morgan where he focused on M&A and capital markets transactions for both private and public companies. He then joined Harvest Partners, a private equity firm in New York, focusing on software and business services buyout. Most recently, Sam moved into earlier stage investing where he worked at Soma Capital primarily focusing on software and fintech.
Sam grew up in New York City and first attended McGill University in Montreal, before graduating summa cum laude from SUNY Binghamton where he received a B.A. in Economics. Outside of work, he is an aspiring outdoorsman, a (very) novice golfer, skier, surfer, and loves to run, read, travel, and listen to podcasts.
