Elastic

Elastic N.V. is the company behind Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine, along with the broader Elastic Stack (formerly known as the ELK Stack, comprising Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). The company was founded in 2012 by Shay Banon, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer, building on the open-source Elasticsearch project Banon originally created in 2010. Elastic is headquartered in Mountain View, California, though it operates as a distributed company with employees across many countries.

The company's core products span three main solution areas: Elastic Enterprise Search, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security, all built on the Elasticsearch and Kibana foundation. Its technology is used for full-text search, log and metrics analysis, application performance monitoring, and security information and event management (SIEM). Customers include organizations across finance, retail, government, and technology sectors, with the software deployed both self-managed and as a hosted service, Elastic Cloud, available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure marketplaces.

Elastic raised approximately $104 million in venture funding from investors including Benchmark, NEA, and Index Ventures prior to its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2018 under the ticker ESTC. In 2021, the company changed its open-source license from Apache 2.0 to a dual-license model using the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and Elastic License, a decision it later partially reversed in 2024 by relicensing Elasticsearch and Kibana under AGPL. Elastic has made several acquisitions over the years, including Opbeat, Swiftype, and Endgame, expanding its capabilities in application performance monitoring, site search, and endpoint security respectively.