Elastic was founded in 2012 by Shay Banon in Amsterdam, building on his earlier open-source project, Elasticsearch. The company is now headquartered in San Francisco and Mountain View, and it went public on the NYSE in 2018 under the ticker ESTC.
The Elastic Stack — made up of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — has become the go-to solution for search, logging, and analytics at scale. Elasticsearch itself powers everything from website search boxes to security information systems processing billions of log entries. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Wikipedia rely on it.
Elastic’s revenue surpassed $1 billion in fiscal year 2024, and the company serves over 20,000 customers across 175 countries. Their cloud offering, Elastic Cloud, runs on all three major cloud providers and has been a big growth driver as organizations shift away from self-managed clusters.
The company has had its share of licensing drama. In 2021, Elastic switched from the Apache 2.0 license to a dual SSPL/Elastic License, primarily to prevent AWS from offering Elasticsearch as a managed service without contributing back. This led AWS to fork the project as OpenSearch. In 2024, Elastic surprised many by adding AGPLv3 as an option, partially reversing course. Through it all, Elasticsearch remains one of the most deployed search engines on the planet.
