Nebius Group Secures 28% Stake in Red-Hot AI Startup Racing Toward IPO

Strategic positioning meets artificial intelligence gold rush as Nebius Group locks down significant minority ownership in one of the sector's most promising ventures.

The Investment Play

Twenty-eight percent doesn't just represent a stake—it represents conviction. Nebius Group's substantial position signals deep belief in this AI startup's trajectory toward public markets.

The IPO Horizon

Public offering preparations are underway, with market watchers already circling. The timing couldn't be more strategic as AI continues eating the technology world—though whether this translates to sustainable profits remains the billion-dollar question that keeps hedge fund managers awake at night.

When venture capitalists bet this big on pre-IPO companies, either they've discovered the next revolution or they're creating the next bubble—the market will decide which within quarters of the opening bell.

Image source: Getty Images.

Another big AI play

The company I am referring to is called ClickHouse, and Nebius acquired its stake in the company in 2021, according to filings. ClickHouse is an AI data company with a range of capabilities, including real-time analytics, machine learning, and generative AI, and data warehousing, among others. Companies can use these capabilities for risk modeling, fraud detection, and sentiment analysis. ClickHouse excels in being able to store and quickly sift and search through massive amounts of data, which gives it many use cases.

In fact, thousands of high-profile customers are already using ClickHouse in their daily operations. For instance, the grocery delivery companyuses ClickHouse as its real-time data store to enable fraud decisions in fractions of a second. Instacart also uses ClickHouse for other functions, including its critical retailer and ads dashboards, A/B testing to compare how two versions of similar content might perform, and machine learning signals.

In a recent interview, ClickHouse's CEO, Aaron Katz, said there are only a handful of tech companies that can meet the back-end needs of companies with thousands of simultaneous users constantly running hundreds of thousands of queries over an enormous data set. "So, it needs to be able to store that data very efficient and in a cost-effective way. And then it needs to be able to provide lightning-fast query experiences, so sub-second latency over both petabytes of historical data and data that's streaming in," Katz said.

In May, ClickHouse raised a $350 million series C round, which valued the company at $6.35 billion, according to Bloomberg. Recently, the company extended this round to new investors, including Citi Ventures, Insight Partners, D.E. Shaw Ventures, and individual investors from the San Francisco 49ers, including Brock Purdy, Christian McCaffrey, and Kyle Juszczyk.

In a recent announcement about extending the series C round, ClickHouse also said it had surpassed 2,000 customers and more than quadrupled annual recurring revenue over the past year. New customers include, Cyera, and ShopMonkey, while long-time customers include Canva, Harvey, LangChain,, and SonyLIV. The company is also seeing strong adoption from popular AI companies like Anthropic and.

An IPO seems likely

While ClickHouse has yet to file a registration statement or do anything officially announcing an IPO, Katz made it very clear that the company is interested in going public. While many companies prefer to stay private longer, Katz said he's more traditional and believes that companies should go public when their technology achieves a certain scale and unit economics. "And so, that's the objective here," he added.

Now, it makes a certain amount of sense that Katz WOULD want to go public. He acknowledged that he's biased because he's had great experiences taking companies public, like when he was an officer at Elastic and atbefore that, when he was a "mid-level manager." The market also feels ripe for IPOs after years of dulled activity, especially for AI IPOs, which investors have gobbled up this year.

With some investors concerned about a bubble, this may be the time to go public while conditions are still favorable. Given the reception to AI IPOs and the company's ties to Nebius, although I haven't seen the company's financials yet, I would expect ClickHouse to be quite popular with investors, which would in turn benefit Nebius by making the company's stake in ClickHouse more valuable.