Elastic
A Dutch-American software company providing enterprise search, observability, security, and data-analysis products built around Elasticsearch.
Last updated October 14, 2026
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Overview
Elastic NV is a Dutch-American enterprise software company whose products help organizations search, analyze, monitor, and protect large volumes of structured and unstructured data. Its central technology is Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine originally developed as an open-source project. Around that engine, Elastic built a broader product family that includes Kibana for visualization and exploration, Logstash for data ingestion and transformation, Beats for lightweight data shipping, and hosted and managed services under the Elastic Cloud brand. Together, these technologies are commonly referred to as the Elastic Stack, and were historically also known as the ELK Stack. The origins of Elastic lie in a personal software project by Shay Banon. While developing a recipe-search application for his wife, who was studying at Le Cordon Bleu, Banon created technology that eventually evolved into Elasticsearch. He developed the search engine with contributions from the open-source community and, in 2012, established a company with Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, and Uri Boness to commercialize and support the project. The business initially operated under the Elasticsearch name, although Elastic became the broader corporate identity over time. A significant early turning point came in 2015, when the company acquired Found, a cloud search provider, and formally adopted the Elastic name. The acquisition supported the company's move from a single open-source search product toward a wider platform and commercial cloud offering. Subsequent acquisitions expanded its capabilities into machine-learning-based anomaly detection, application and website search, endpoint protection, cloud security, Linux monitoring, and cloud-performance optimization. These transactions helped Elastic position its technology as a common data layer for multiple enterprise workloads rather than simply a search engine. Elastic's business serves several overlapping markets. In enterprise search, its technology is used to index and retrieve information from websites, applications, internal knowledge systems, and large data repositories. In observability, Elastic products collect and analyze logs, metrics, traces, and profiling data to help engineering teams understand application and infrastructure performance. In security, the platform supports endpoint protection, threat detection, investigation, and security analytics. Elastic has also incorporated machine learning and artificial-intelligence capabilities to improve anomaly detection, relevance, natural-language interaction, and discovery across large datasets. The company operates as a distributed organization with employees and teams located around the world. It is registered in the Netherlands and has maintained important operations in both Amsterdam and the San Francisco Bay Area. Elastic shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ESTC. Its commercial model combines subscriptions, support, managed cloud services, and enterprise deployments. Elastic Cloud provides hosted access to the platform, while Elastic Cloud Enterprise supports organizations that need to operate Elastic deployments across private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. Elastic has been used by large internet, media, retail, transportation, and technology organizations, including companies identified in public descriptions such as eBay, Wikipedia, Yelp, Uber, Lyft, Tinder, and Netflix. Its open-source roots, broad integration ecosystem, and ability to process high-volume data have contributed to adoption across developers, operations teams, security professionals, analysts, and search engineers. The company has also faced the operational pressures common to fast-growing software businesses, including workforce reductions. In November 2022, it announced a reduction affecting approximately 13 percent of its workforce. Elastic remains an active public software company focused on combining search,…
History
Elastic NV developed from Elasticsearch, a distributed search engine created by Shay Banon. Banon initially worked on the technology while building a recipe-search application for his wife, who was studying at Le Cordon Bleu. The project evolved into a general-purpose search and analytics engine and was developed for several years with contributions from the open-source community. In 2012, Banon joined with Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, and Uri Boness to establish a company around Elasticsearch. The business initially used the Elasticsearch name and focused on supporting the open-source project, building commercial services, and developing a user and partner ecosystem. Elasticsearch's ability to index and query large datasets made it useful for website search, application search, log analysis, and operational monitoring. The company broadened its technology base through the Elastic Stack. Logstash provided ingestion and transformation, Kibana supplied visualization and exploration, and Beats offered lightweight data collection agents. These components were frequently deployed together with Elasticsearch and became widely known as the ELK Stack or Elastic Stack. This combination allowed the company to address not only search but also logging, monitoring, analytics, and security workflows. In 2015, Elastic acquired Found, a hosted search provider. The transaction helped accelerate its cloud strategy and was followed by the adoption of Elastic as the company's broader corporate identity. Elastic subsequently acquired Prelert in 2016, adding anomaly-detection expertise, and Swiftype in 2017, strengthening search products for websites and applications. The company entered the security market more forcefully with the 2019 acquisition of Endgame, an endpoint-security provider. Elastic later expanded into cloud security and Linux monitoring through the 2021 acquisitions of build.security and Cmd. The acquisition of Optimyze in the same year added cloud-performance technology and supported the company's observability ambitions. Elastic's product scope consequently came to encompass three closely related enterprise areas: search, observability, and security. Elastic Cloud provided a managed service, while Elastic Cloud Enterprise supported deployment and management in private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Machine learning and artificial-intelligence features were added to improve anomaly detection, search relevance, threat analysis, and interaction with large information collections. The company became a public issuer, with ordinary shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ESTC. It operates as a distributed organization, with a registered corporate presence in Amsterdam and significant activity in the United States and other global locations. In November 2022, Elastic reduced its workforce by approximately 13 percent. The reduction reflected the broader adjustment taking place across the enterprise software sector and represented a significant organizational change. In 2025, Elastic continued expanding its AIOps and artificial-intelligence capabilities through the acquisitions of Keep and Jina AI. Keep contributed an open-source platform for alert management and incident response, while Jina AI added search and AI-related technology. These developments fit Elastic's long-term evolution from an open-source search project into a public enterprise platform company serving developers, operations teams, security professionals, analysts, and organizations managing large-scale data.
- 2025
Keep and Jina AI acquisitions
[1]Elastic acquires Keep and Jina AI, expanding its AIOps, incident-response, search, and artificial-intelligence capabilities.
- 2022
Workforce reduction
[1]Elastic announces a workforce reduction affecting approximately 13 percent of employees.
- 2021
Cloud security, Linux monitoring, and profiling expansion
[1]Elastic acquires build.security, Cmd, and Optimyze to extend its cloud-security, Linux-monitoring, and cloud-performance capabilities.
- 2019
Endgame acquisition
[1]Elastic acquires endpoint-security company Endgame, broadening the platform into endpoint protection and security analytics.
- 2018
Elastic becomes publicly traded
[1]Elastic's ordinary shares begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ESTC.
- 2017
Swiftype acquisition
[1]Elastic acquires Swiftype, expanding its application and website search capabilities.
- 2016
Prelert acquisition
[1]Elastic acquires Prelert to add machine-learning-based anomaly-detection capabilities.
- 2015
Found acquisition and Elastic rebrand
[1]The company acquires Found, a cloud search provider, and adopts Elastic as its broader corporate identity.
- 2012
Elasticsearch company is founded
[1]Shay Banon, Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, and Uri Boness establish the company that commercializes and supports Elasticsearch.
- 2009
Elasticsearch is developed
[1]Shay Banon develops Elasticsearch after creating search technology for a recipe application and continues developing it with the open-source community.
Products and positioning
Enterprise search, observability, security analytics, and artificial-intelligence-enabled data platform provider.
Search and analytics engine · 2009
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is Elastic's core distributed search and analytics engine. It indexes and queries large volumes of structured and unstructured data and supports website search, application search, log analysis, observability, security investigation, and data exploration. Its distributed architecture is designed for scalable deployment across clusters and cloud environments.
Data visualization and analysis
Kibana
Kibana is a visual interface for exploring and presenting data stored in Elasticsearch. It provides dashboards, charts, search tools, investigative workflows, and operational views used by developers, analysts, operations teams, and security professionals.
Data ingestion and transformation
Logstash
Logstash is a data-processing pipeline used to collect, transform, enrich, and route information from many sources. It is commonly deployed with Elasticsearch and Kibana to move logs and event data into searchable and analyzable storage.
Lightweight data shippers
Beats
Beats is a family of lightweight agents that collect system, application, network, and security data and send it to Elastic destinations. The agents are designed for distributed deployment on servers, containers, endpoints, and other infrastructure.
Managed cloud service
Elastic Cloud
Elastic Cloud delivers managed Elastic deployments through cloud infrastructure. It provides hosted access to search, observability, and security capabilities while reducing the operational burden of provisioning, upgrading, and maintaining the underlying platform.
Enterprise deployment platform
Elastic Cloud Enterprise
Elastic Cloud Enterprise is designed for organizations that need to manage Elastic deployments across private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. It supports centralized administration and deployment of Elastic software for enterprise-scale use cases.
Cybersecurity platform
Elastic Security
Elastic Security applies the Elastic platform to endpoint protection, threat detection, security analytics, investigation, and response. Its development was reinforced by the acquisition of Endgame and subsequent cloud-security investments.
Observability platform
Elastic Observability
Elastic Observability helps teams collect and analyze logs, metrics, traces, and profiling data. It is intended to support monitoring, troubleshooting, application-performance analysis, infrastructure visibility, and detection of operational anomalies.
AI-enabled search and data platform
Search AI Lake
Search AI Lake is an Elastic offering aimed at search and artificial-intelligence workloads over large data collections and data lakes. It reflects the company's effort to combine search, retrieval, analytics, and AI-oriented data access.
Brand decisions
2025
Acquire Keep and Jina AIM&ABackground
Elastic was expanding its platform toward AIOps, incident response, artificial intelligence, and advanced search.
Action taken
Elastic acquired Keep, an open-source AIOps and alert-management platform, and Jina AI.
Aftermath
The acquisitions broadened Elastic's capabilities in incident response, AI-oriented search, and data access.
2022
Reduce workforce amid business conditionsStrategyBackground
The company adjusted its cost structure during a period of pressure and uncertainty across the technology sector.
Action taken
Elastic announced layoffs affecting approximately 13 percent of its workforce.
Aftermath
The reduction represented a substantial organizational restructuring while Elastic continued focusing on cloud, search, observability, and security products.
2021
Expand into cloud security, monitoring, and profilingM&ABackground
Elastic was broadening its platform across cloud-native operations and security workloads.
Action taken
Elastic acquired build.security, Cmd, and Optimyze.
Aftermath
The acquisitions strengthened Elastic's cloud-security, Linux-monitoring, observability, and performance-analysis portfolio.
2019
Acquire Endgame for endpoint securityM&ABackground
Elastic sought to extend its search and analytics platform into cybersecurity and endpoint protection.
Action taken
The company acquired Endgame, an endpoint-security provider, in a transaction publicly described as valued at approximately $234 million.
Aftermath
Endpoint security became an important component of Elastic's broader security product strategy.
Transaction value. $234 million (2019 transaction)
2015
Acquire Found and broaden the corporate brandM&ABackground
The company was expanding beyond its original identity as a search-engine project and needed stronger cloud and hosted-search capabilities.
Action taken
Elastic acquired Found, a cloud-based search provider, and moved toward using Elastic as the overarching corporate identity.
Aftermath
The transaction supported the company's transition toward a broader enterprise search, analytics, and cloud platform.
Recent events
- Unconfirmed
Reported
Elastic launches AlertZero and Elastic nightshift AI agents in Australia[3]
Elastic launched two AI agent products in Australia: AlertZero, designed for security operations tasks such as triage, hunting, detection tuning and forensics, and Elastic nightshift, an AI SRE agent for Site Reliability Engineering and operational troubleshooting. Both products rely on Elastic's platform as the data foundation, and the company said analysts must approve consequential actions in AlertZero.
- Unconfirmed
AWS releases Apache-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks[4]
AWS released Elasticsearch and Kibana forks under the Apache 2.0 license in response to Elastic's license change. AWS said the forks use the latest Apache 2.0-licensed 7.10 versions and that it would publish new GitHub repositories and later include the projects in its open distribution.
Reported
Bricata and Elastic announce technology partnership[5]
Bricata announced a technology partnership with Elastic, describing integration of its Network Security platform with Elastic SIEM and Elastic Endpoint Security.
Reported
Elastic partners with Defending Digital Campaigns on election security[6]
Elastic partnered with Defending Digital Campaigns to provide free endpoint security services to campaigns for the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and congressional races.
Reported
Elastic partners with Defending Digital Campaigns to provide campaign security[7]
Elastic announced a partnership with Defending Digital Campaigns to offer free monitored Elastic Endpoint Security to 2020 presidential and congressional campaigns.
- Unconfirmed
Reported
Elastic completes acquisition of Endgame[8]
Elastic announced that it had completed its acquisition of Endgame. The stated total purchase price was $234 million, subject to customary adjustments.
Sources8 sources
- 1Elastic NVen.wikipedia.org
- 2Elastic official websiteelastic.co
- 3Elastic在澳大利亚推出AlertZero与Elastic nightshift AI智能体channellife.com.au
- 4AWS发布采用Apache授权的Elasticsearch和Kibana分支ithome.com.tw
- 5Bricata与Elastic宣布技术合作prweb.com
- 6Elastic与Defending Digital Campaigns合作提供竞选网络安全服务cisomag.com
- 7Elastic与Defending Digital Campaigns合作提供竞选安全服务finanznachrichten.de
- 8Elastic完成对Endgame的收购finanznachrichten.de
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