Elasticsearch B.V. is a private company that specializes in search and data analytics solutions. Their key product, Elastic, provides a powerful platform for real-time data exploration and analysis. Founded in 2012 and based in Amsterdam, they serve various industries including technology, finance, and e-commerce.
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Revenue: 1b_10b
Employees: 1k_5k
Website: https://www.elastic.co
Elasticsearch B.V. is the Dutch-registered legal entity behind Elastic N.V., a publicly traded software company (NYSE: ESTC) that develops the Elastic Search AI Platform — a unified suite for enterprise search, observability, and cybersecurity. The platform is built on Elasticsearch, an open-source distributed search and analytics engine, and extends into managed cloud services (Elastic Cloud) and three primary solution lines: Search, Observability, and Security. Elastic operates in the enterprise search, log analytics, SIEM, and observability software categories.
Elasticsearch B.V. is the registered legal entity of Elastic N.V., a Dutch-American software company incorporated in Amsterdam, Netherlands [4]. The company develops and sells the Elastic Search AI Platform, which comprises three main solution lines — Search, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security — delivered as self-managed software, a fully managed cloud service (Elastic Cloud), or in hybrid and multi-cloud environments [20]. The core of the platform is Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene that exposes its capabilities through a JSON and REST API [3]. Surrounding tools include Kibana (data visualization), Logstash (data ingestion pipelines), and Beats (lightweight data shippers), collectively known as the Elastic Stack or ELK Stack [44]. Elastic generates revenue primarily through subscriptions, with subscription revenue comprising approximately 93–94% of total sales, using a land-and-expand model that begins with open-source or self-service cloud entry points and graduates customers to higher-tier enterprise plans [22].
Shay Banon created the precursor to Elasticsearch, called Compass, in 2004, and released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010 [3]. Elastic N.V. was formally founded in 2012 in Amsterdam to commercialize the open-source project; co-founders include Simon Willnauer, Uri Boness, and Steven Schuurman alongside Banon [8]. The company raised a $10 million Series A from Benchmark and Index Ventures in 2012, a $24 million Series B in early 2013, and a $70 million Series C in June 2014 led by New Enterprise Associates [3][6][10]. In March 2015, the company rebranded from Elasticsearch B.V. to Elastic and simultaneously acquired Found, a cloud-based search provider that became the foundation for Elastic Cloud [4][1]. Subsequent acquisitions included Prelert (behavioral analytics/anomaly detection, 2016), Swiftype (site search, 2017), build.security (policy enforcement, 2021), Optimyze (continuous profiling, 2021), Keep (AIOps alert management, 2025), and Jina AI (AI search models, 2025) [4][58]. Elastic went public on the NYSE under ticker ESTC on October 5, 2018, raising $252 million [9]. In January 2021, Elastic relicensed Elasticsearch and Kibana from Apache License 2.0 to the Server Side Public License and Elastic License, citing AWS's use of the software as a managed service without contribution; AWS subsequently forked the project as OpenSearch [3]. In August 2024 Elastic announced Elasticsearch would become open source again [3].
Elastic reports that its Search AI Platform is used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500 and by approximately 21,500 subscription customers as of April 30, 2025 [56][20]. Named customers in public sources include eBay, Wikipedia, Yelp, Uber, Lyft, Tinder, Netflix, Microsoft, Cisco, Comcast, Walmart, Adobe, and Pfizer [4][53]. For fiscal year 2025 (ending April 30, 2025), Elastic reported total revenue of approximately $1.48 billion, a 17% year-over-year increase, with Elastic Cloud revenue of $688 million, up 26% year-over-year [22][14]. The trailing twelve months revenue as of April 30, 2026 was $1.739 billion [14]. In Gartner's 2023 Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability, Elastic was placed in the "Visionaries" category [25]. In 2024, Elastic achieved leader status in the IDC MarketScape for SIEM [53]. The company was also named to the BCG/Fortune Future 50 list in 2024 [55].
Elastic competes across three distinct markets simultaneously, each with established incumbents. In log analytics and SIEM, the primary rival is Splunk (acquired by Cisco in 2024), which is positioned for large-scale enterprise security and compliance; independent analysis notes that Elastic is displacing Splunk in mid-market accounts and functioning as a secondary SIEM in large enterprises, in part because Elastic's cold-storage tiering offers a lower cost per GB for high-volume log retention [22][21]. In observability, Elastic competes against Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and open-source stacks such as Grafana/Prometheus/Loki; Datadog is described by analysts as the current leader in full-stack observability, with Elastic seen as more of a DIY, log-centric alternative with flexible self-managed deployment [22][25]. In enterprise and AI search, AWS OpenSearch Service — forked from Elasticsearch 7.10 — is the most direct rival, and Elastic's licensing changes contributed to its growth; Elastic counters with proprietary relevance features, vector search, and semantic search capabilities not present in the fork [21][27]. Specialized vector database providers including Pinecone, Milvus, and Weaviate represent an emerging competitive front for AI-driven retrieval workloads [21]. Elastic's cross-product approach to consolidating search, observability, and security on one platform is both a strategic differentiator and a structural challenge, as it requires competing against specialists in each segment [27].