$6B Valuation: What ClickHouse's New Round Means for Nebius

More good news for Nebius Group — yesterday, The Information reported that ClickHouse is at an advanced stage of negotiations with investors about raising a new funding round at a $6 billion valuation. Why is this important for Nebius? Nebius owned 28% of ClickHouse shares before this round. But before discussing the direct impact of ClickHouse's new valuation on Nebius, let me tell you a bit about ClickHouse, as this company definitely deserves attention.

What is ClickHouse?

The company's main product is a high-performance analytical database management system (DBMS). In 2009, ClickHouse started as an experimental project within Yandex to test the hypothesis of generating real-time analytical reports from non-aggregated data that is also being added in real-time. ClickHouse became a full-fledged product within Yandex in 2012, and then in 2016, Yandex released its developments as open source. The main advantage of ClickHouse is its high-speed data processing. According to the company, ClickHouse is 100-1000 times faster than traditional solutions of similar DBMS types.

ClickHouse's Independent Journey

ClickHouse became a separate company from Yandex in September 2021. At that time, ClickHouse was spun off into a separate company, which raised $50 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and several other investors. By the end of October 2021, ClickHouse had raised another round of funding amounting to $250 million at a $2 billion valuation. The lead investors in that round were Coatue and Altimeter.

ClickHouse’s Business Development

The company released its first commercial product (in beta version) in October 2022. It was the ClickHouse Cloud offering, which eliminated the need for companies to manage server infrastructure and simplified working with ClickHouse. In December of the same year, a more extensive customer outreach began — ClickHouse became available on Amazon's cloud (AWS). The ClickHouse service became available on Google Cloud (GCP) in 2023, and in the same year on Alibaba Cloud as well. Microsoft Azure added ClickHouse in 2024. Although there is no public data on ClickHouse's financial performance, considering the product improvements and greater reach to potential customers through major cloud providers, I think they're doing quite well, which is what led to a round with a higher valuation.

New Round and Impact on Nebius

It's worth noting that not many private software companies that raised new funds after 2021-2022 received a higher valuation compared to their 2021-2022 valuation, let alone three times higher than the previous one. This indicates that ClickHouse is doing quite well. Of course, we need to wait for confirmation of the valuation information from the company itself, but even with preliminary data, we can already estimate the approximate impact on Nebius.

If we assume that Nebius did not participate in this round, its stake will decrease, and the valuation of its share will be lower. But if Nebius participated proportionally to its stake and maintained its 28%, then this stake is now valued at $1.68 billion. However, to achieve this, Nebius would have had to pay 28% of the round size. Translated to Nebius stock, $1.68 billion is almost $7 per share, which is quite good and once again underscores the undervaluation of Nebius shares. For conservatism in my Nebius’s valuation, I used, for example, not even the 2022 round valuation, but data from Notice, which reflected a value of approximately $700 million, equivalent to $0.8 per Nebius share. I think the most aggressive ClickHouse valuations were not higher than $2 billion, so this is quite a significant valuation increase.

I am looking forward to official comments from ClickHouse and Nebius comments on this matter during the May 20 earnings report.