Elastic N.V.

What does Elastic N.V. own?

Elastic owns the Elasticsearch engine and the Elastic platform products built on it: Elastic Cloud, Elastic Observability, Elastic Security, and the Search AI Platform. It operates a single brand rather than a portfolio.

Is Elastic publicly traded?

Yes. Elastic N.V. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker ESTC as a Russell 1000 component.

Who founded Elastic?

Shay Banon, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer founded the company in Amsterdam in 2012 around Banon's open source Elasticsearch project.

Where is Elastic headquartered?

The company is legally headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with principal executive offices in Mountain View, California, and employees across more than 40 countries.

How many brands does Elastic own?

One. Elastic operates a single masterbrand covering Elasticsearch, Elastic Cloud, Observability, and Security as product names rather than separate brands.

Who owns Elastic?

Public shareholders, led by institutional investors including Vanguard, BlackRock, and Benchmark. Co-founder Shay Banon remains a significant individual shareholder and CTO; there is no controlling owner.

What is Elastic's revenue?

$1.74 billion in fiscal 2026 ended April 30, 2026, up about 17 percent. Elastic Cloud revenue was $688 million in fiscal 2025, growing 26 percent.

The company grew out of a single open source project. Shay Banon began building Elasticsearch in 2009 as a distributed search engine on Apache Lucene, initially for a personal recipe application. The project drew a large community, and in 2012 Banon founded the company in Amsterdam with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer.

Early commercial strategy followed the open source playbook: the software remained free while the company sold subscriptions for support, management tooling, and proprietary features. The addition of Logstash and Kibana completed the ELK stack, which became standard infrastructure for log analytics. In 2015 the company changed its name from Elasticsearch to Elastic.

Elastic listed on the NYSE in October 2018 under ESTC. Post-IPO expansion pushed beyond search into observability and security, including the 2019 acquisition of endpoint security company Endgame, which became the basis of Elastic Security.

The decisive strategic conflict came in 2021. Elastic announced that new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana would move from the Apache 2.0 license to the Server Side Public License and Elastic License, a direct attempt to stop AWS from selling the software as a competing hosted service. AWS responded by forking the projects into OpenSearch, fracturing the community. In 2024 Elastic partially walked the move back by adding the OSI-approved AGPL as a licensing option alongside its commercial licenses.

Under CEO Ashutosh Kulkarni, who succeeded co-founder Schuurman's successors in 2022, Elastic has repositioned itself as the Search AI Company. Its fiscal 2025 revenue reached $1.48 billion and fiscal 2026 reached $1.74 billion, driven by Elastic Cloud growth and demand for vector search and retrieval augmented generation workloads.

The dominant controversy is the 2021 license change. Moving Elasticsearch and Kibana from Apache 2.0 to SSPL and the Elastic License was widely criticized in the open source community as a license rug pull, the OSI refused to classify SSPL as open source, and AWS forked the codebase into OpenSearch, which now competes directly with the original. Elastic has argued the change was necessary to protect its commercial viability, and its 2024 addition of the AGPL partially addressed the criticism, though the fork remains.

Other scrutiny has been routine: a 2019 episode in which Elastic restricted downloads in US-sanctioned countries, periodic litigation over patents and employment matters, and standard public company governance questions. No regulatory fines or product recalls are on record.