Who Owns Elastic?

The company began inside an open source project. Shay Banon created Elasticsearch in 2009 and 2010 as a distributed search engine built on Apache Lucene, initially for a recipe application he was writing. The project attracted a large developer community, and in 2012 Banon co-founded the company in Amsterdam with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer to commercialize it.

The first years were spent expanding the product family. Logstash for data ingestion and Kibana for visualization joined Elasticsearch to form what became known as the ELK stack, and the company sold subscriptions for support, management, and commercial features. In 2015 the company renamed itself from Elasticsearch to Elastic to reflect the broadened product line.

Elastic went public on the NYSE in October 2018. The following years extended the business beyond search into two adjacent markets: observability, for logging, metrics, and application performance monitoring, and security, through the 2019 acquisition of endpoint security firm Endgame and the buildout of a SIEM offering.

A defining corporate event came in 2021 when Elastic changed the license for new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana from Apache 2.0 to the more restrictive Server Side Public License and Elastic License, a direct response to Amazon Web Services offering the software as a hosted service. Amazon forked the project as OpenSearch in response. In 2024 Elastic partially reversed course by adding the open source AGPL as a licensing option.

Under Kulkarni the company has repositioned as what it calls the Search AI Company, centering the platform on vector search, retrieval augmented generation, and AI-driven security analytics. Fiscal 2025 revenue reached $1.48 billion and fiscal 2026 reached $1.74 billion, with Elastic Cloud revenue of $688 million in fiscal 2025 growing at 26 percent.