Summary

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale rev…

Key takeaways

• Clickhouse achieved revenue growth of $0→$12M→$50M→$200M→$500M+ in ARR, with net dollar retention exceeding 200% and gross retention above 99%, driven by expanding multi-use-case adoption across AI-native enterprises.
• Agents lack identity, budget, and governance frameworks today, but within 3–5 years autonomous agents will select and provision entire infrastructure stacks—positioning low-latency, resource-efficient databases like Clickhouse as default agent-selected infrastructure.
• Open source PLG distribution (no sales friction, self-serve deployment) proved more capital-efficient than enterprise-heavy GTM, but under-investment in sales capacity at scale was the single biggest strategic regret.

Why this matters

As agentic workloads replace predictable human query patterns with high-volume, exploratory, unpredictable requests, B2B infrastructure vendors must rethink pricing models, deployment flexibility, and go-to-market strategy to capture durable, high-retention revenue in the AI era.

Entities

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Show notes

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Ma

Themes

• openai
• anthropic
• investing