Elastic (company)

Elastic (company). Elastic is a global technology company that provides a suite of software products for search, observability, and security, built around the open-source Elasticsearch engine. Founded in 2012, the company is dual-headquartered in Mountain View, California and Amsterdam, Netherlands, and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ESTC. Its platform enables organizations to perform real-time search, logging, and analytics across structured and unstructured data.

History

The company was founded in Amsterdam in 2012 by Shay Banon, who initially created Elasticsearch as a distributed search engine based on Apache Lucene. Co-founders Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer joined Banon to build a business around the open-source project. Elastic experienced rapid adoption, leading to the establishment of its second headquarters in Silicon Valley and significant venture capital funding from firms like Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. In 2018, the company filed for an initial public offering and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A major legal dispute arose with Amazon Web Services regarding the trademark and distribution of Elasticsearch, which was ultimately settled. In 2024, Ash Kulkarni succeeded Banon as Chief Executive Officer.

Products and services

The core offering is the Elastic Stack, which integrates several open-source projects: the Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, the Kibana data visualization dashboard, the Logstash data processing pipeline, and lightweight data shippers known as Beats. The company provides a managed cloud service, Elastic Cloud, available on major platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Commercial features for enterprise security and observability are sold under subscriptions, including solutions for SIEM, APM, and Log management. These tools are used by thousands of organizations, including Netflix, Uber, and Cisco Systems.

Business model

Elastic operates on a commercial open-core model, where the foundational software is available under open-source licenses like the Apache License 2.0 and SSPL, while advanced features, proprietary extensions, and managed services are offered under commercial subscriptions. Revenue is generated primarily through subscription fees for its SaaS platform, Elastic Cloud, and enterprise licenses that include support, security, and compliance features. The company targets large enterprises across sectors such as finance, government, and retail, competing with vendors like Splunk, Datadog, and the OpenSearch project. Its financial performance is reported quarterly to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Acquisitions

Elastic has grown its technology portfolio and market reach through several strategic acquisitions. In 2015, it acquired Found, the creator of a hosted Elasticsearch service. Key acquisitions include Prelert in 2016 for behavioral analytics, Opbeat in 2017 for APM capabilities, and Swiftype in 2017 for site and app search. In 2019, the company acquired Endpoint Security for workload protection and, in a significant move, purchased Insight.io to enhance code search functionalities. These acquisitions have been integrated into the Elastic Stack to expand its observability and security offerings.

Open source involvement

The company was built on and remains a major contributor to open-source software, with its flagship projects Elasticsearch and Kibana historically licensed under the Apache License 2.0. In response to cloud provider commercialization, Elastic transitioned these core products to the SSPL and Elastic License in 2021. It maintains a large open-source community and contributes to upstream projects like Apache Lucene. The company's relationship with the open-source community has been complex, highlighted by the fork of Elasticsearch by Amazon Web Services to create the OpenSearch project. Despite this, Elastic continues to develop its open-source offerings while protecting its commercial business.

Category:American software companies Category:Search engine software Category:Companies based in Santa Clara County, California Category:Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange