Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The largest pre-seed in enterprise software history happened without a pitch deck, a product, or a single customer.
Aaron Katz raised $50M for ClickHouse on conviction alone.
We had him on the latest episode of Gradient Dissent, and the man does not hold back. He goes after Snowflake, Datadog, and Databricks by name. He talks about wiring $100M out of SVB 30 minutes before it collapsed.
And he gets into why when Anthropic asked Claude which database to use for a specific use case, the answer was ClickHouse every time.
His vision is clear: ClickHouse is the fastest database in AI and he is designing the entire stack for agents, not humans.
The largest pre-seed in enterprise software history happened without a pitch deck, a product, or a single customer.
Aaron Katz raised $50M for ClickHouse on conviction alone.
We had him on the latest episode of Gradient Dissent, and the man does not hold back. He goes after Snowflake, Datadog, and Databricks by name. He talks about wiring $100M out of SVB 30 minutes before it collapsed.
And he gets into why when Anthropic asked Claude which database to use for a specific use case, the answer was ClickHouse every time.
His vision is clear: ClickHouse is the fastest database in AI and he is designing the entire stack for agents, not humans.
