Elastic N.V. (Elastic), a Search AI Company, enables its customers to transform data into answers, actions, and outcomes with Search AI.
Elastic’s Search AI Platform (‘the company’s platform’) combines the precision of search with the intelligence of AI to help the company’s customers and community solve real-time business problems, unlock potential value, and achieve better outcomes. The company’s platform, available as either a cloud service or a self-managed software, allows its customers to...
Elastic N.V. (Elastic), a Search AI Company, enables its customers to transform data into answers, actions, and outcomes with Search AI.
Elastic’s Search AI Platform (‘the company’s platform’) combines the precision of search with the intelligence of AI to help the company’s customers and community solve real-time business problems, unlock potential value, and achieve better outcomes. The company’s platform, available as either a cloud service or a self-managed software, allows its customers to find insights and drive AI and machine learning use cases from large amounts of data.
The company offers three Search AI-powered solutions—Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security—that are built on the company’s platform. It helps organizations, their employees, and their customers find what they need faster, while keeping mission-critical applications and infrastructure running smoothly, and protecting against cyber threats.
The company’s platform is able to ingest data from any source, in any format, and perform search, analysis, and visualization of that data. With Elasticsearch at its core, the company’s platform is a highly scalable document store and search engine, and is the unified data store for all of its solutions and use cases. Featuring a common, solution-agnostic user interface with powerful drag-and-drop visual analytics, centralized management capabilities, and the world's most downloaded open source vector database, the company’s platform gives developers a full suite of sophisticated retrieval algorithms and the ability to integrate with large language models (‘LLM’). It delivers the comprehensive set of capabilities developers need to build, maintain, and secure next-generation applications and services. In addition, its out-of-the-box solutions (Elastic Observability and Elastic Security) deliver fast time-to-value for common use cases, and, paired with its developer-centric platform, which is extensible and customizable, allow the company to innovate quickly and differentiate its offerings at every level.
The company makes its platform available as a service across major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services (‘AWS’), Google Cloud Platform (‘GCP’), and Microsoft (‘Azure’)) in more than 55 public cloud regions globally. Customers can also deploy the company’s platform across hybrid clouds, public or private clouds, and multi-cloud environments.
The company’s business model is based primarily on a combination of paid service offerings (Elastic Cloud Hosted and Elastic Cloud Serverless) and free and paid proprietary self-managed software (Elastic Self-Managed). The company’s paid offerings for its platform are sold via subscription through resource-based pricing, and all customers and users have access to varying levels of features across all solutions. In Elastic Cloud, the company’s family of cloud-based offerings, it offers various subscription tiers tied to different features. For users who download its software, the company makes some of the features of its software available free of charge, allowing it to engage with a broad community of developers and practitioners and introduce them to the value of its platform.
The company develops the majority of its software in public repositories under an open source GNU Affero General Public License v3 (‘AGPL’) license, as well as under a proprietary license. Unlike some companies, it does not build an enterprise version that is separate from its free distribution. The company maintains a single code base across both its self-managed software and Elastic-hosted services. The core of Elasticsearch and Kibana (a user interface) are open source under an AGPL license, and the company’s open source code is housed in public repositories.
The company’s customers often significantly expand their usage of its products and services over time. Expansion includes increasing the number of developers and practitioners using its products, increasing the utilization of its products for a particular use case, and utilizing its products to address new use cases. The company focuses some of its direct sales efforts on encouraging this type of expansion within its customer base, both within, as well as across solutions. As of April 30, 2025, it had approximately 21,500 customers.
Products
The company’s products enable its customers and users to find relevant information and insights nearly instantly in large amounts of data across a broad range of business and consumer use cases.
The company’s platform includes a powerful set of solutions able to ingest and store data from any source, in any format, and perform search, analysis, and visualization, usually in milliseconds. The company’s platform can be used by developers and IT decision-makers to power a variety of use cases. It also offers software solutions built on the Search AI Platform that address a wide variety of use cases. The company’s platform and each of its solutions (Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security) are designed to run in public or private clouds, in hybrid environments, or in multi-cloud environments.
Elastic’s Search AI Platform
At the company’s core, the company’s platform is powered by Elasticsearch—a distributed, real-time vector database and analytics engine and data store for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. The company’s platform includes a user interface (known as ‘Kibana’) that is the visualization layer for data stored in Elasticsearch; this layer is also the management and configuration interface for all parts of its platform.
Elastic enables organizations to integrate generative AI and large language models by building key capabilities into its products.
Paid features enable capabilities, such as automating anomaly detection on time-series data at scale through machine learning, facilitating compliance with data security and privacy regulations, supporting search across low-cost cold and frozen data tiers, and allowing real-time notifications and alerts. The source code of features included as part of the company’s platform is generally visible to the public in the form of ‘open source.’
Solutions
The company has built a number of solutions into its platform to make it easier for organizations to use its software for common use cases. The company’s solutions include the following:
Elasticsearch: The company’s search solution provides a powerful foundation for building search AI-powered applications. Key use cases for Elasticsearch include generative AI and retrieval-augmented generation, search applications, and foundational capabilities for building search experiences to support websites and portals, e-commerce, mobile app search, customer support, and workplace search.
Elastic Observability: The company’s observability solution enables unified analysis across the IT ecosystem of applications, networks, and infrastructure. Observability includes log analytics, to search, analyze, and visualize petabytes of structured and unstructured logs; infrastructure monitoring, to gain visibility across cloud, on-premises, Kubernetes, serverless, and hosts; Application Performance Monitoring (‘APM’), to stream native production-grade OpenTelemetry without proprietary agents, and gain broad language support to deliver insight to pinpoint code issues and debug faster; digital experience monitoring, to improve user experience with synthetic testing, real user monitoring (‘RUM’), and uptime monitoring AI for IT operations (‘AIOps’), always-on machine learning analysis that instantly surfaces anomalies, patterns, correlations, and root cause; and LLM observability, to track latency, errors, prompts, responses, usage, and costs for all major LLM services.
Elastic Security: The company’s security solution provides unified protection to prevent, detect, and respond to threats. The company’s Search AI-driven security analytics solution includes Security Information and Event Management (‘SIEM’), with integrations to network, host, user, and cloud data sources. Elastic Security enables investigations, incident management, shareable analytics, and workflow automation through Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (‘SOAR’); and extended protection within SIEM with third-party integrations and first-party protections for both Endpoint Security (prevention, detection, and response); and Cloud Security (cloud posture assessment, vulnerability management, and cloud workload protection).
Deployment Options
The company’s platform and its solutions can be deployed in public or private clouds, in hybrid environments, or in multi-cloud environments, to satisfy various user and customer needs. Elastic Cloud, its family of cloud-based offerings (inclusive of both Elastic Cloud Hosted and Elastic Cloud Serverless), is hosted on major public cloud providers. It also partners with other cloud providers that offer its software to users on their cloud platform as a hosted offering.
Users can also download and manage their own deployments of the company’s platform and its solutions. To help with more complex deployment scenarios, the company offers paid proprietary products to deliver centralized provisioning, management, and monitoring across multiple deployments.
Growth Strategies
The company’s strategies are to extend its product leadership through continued investment in its technology; increase product adoption by improving ease of use and growing the company’s user community; expand its customer base by acquiring new customers; expand within its existing customer base through new use cases and larger deployments; increase usage of Elastic Cloud; expand its strategic and regional partnerships; and selectively pursue strategic acquisitions.
Customers
Organizations of all sizes, across many industries, including enterprises, educational institutions, and government entities, purchase the company’s products for a variety of use cases. As of April 30, 2025, it had approximately 21,500 customers. One customer, a channel partner, accounted for 12% of total revenue for the year ended April 30, 2025.
Seasonality
The company has experienced quarterly fluctuations and seasonality in its sales and results of operations based on its entry into agreements with new and existing customers, customer usage patterns for its consumption-based arrangements, and the mix between annual and monthly contracts entered into in each reporting period. Seasonality in the company’s sales cycle generally reflects a trend toward the highest sales in its fourth fiscal quarter and lowest sales in its first fiscal quarter (year ended April 30, 2025).
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expense totaled $365.8 million for the year ended April 30, 2025.
Sales and Marketing
The company makes it easy for users to begin using its products in order to drive rapid adoption. Users can either sign up for a free trial on Elastic Cloud or download the company’s software directly from its website without any sales interaction, and immediately begin using the full set of features. Users can also sign up for Elastic Cloud through public cloud marketplaces.
With the company’s business model, where users can download and use many of its features free of charge, its sales prospects are often already familiar with or using its platform. The company conducts low-touch campaigns to keep users and customers engaged once they have begun using Elastic Cloud or have downloaded its software. This process includes providing high-quality content, documentation, webinars, videos, and blogs through the company’s website. The company also drives high-touch engagement with qualified prospects and customers to drive further awareness, adoption, and expansion of the company’s products with paid subscriptions. The majority of the company’s new customers use Elastic Cloud. Many of these customers start with limited initial spending on its products but can significantly increase their spending over time.
The company’s sales teams are organized primarily by geography and secondarily by customer segments. It relies on inside sales development representatives to qualify leads based on the likelihood they will result in a purchase. The company pursues sales opportunities both through its direct sales force and with the assistance of its partners, including through cloud marketplaces. The company’s relationships within customer organizations often extend beyond the initial users of the technology and include technology and business decision-makers at various levels. The company also engages with its customers on an ongoing basis through a customer success team, to ensure customer satisfaction and expand their use of its technology.
Partners
The company maintains partner relationships that help it market and deliver its products to its customers and complement its community. The company’s partner relationships include the following:
Cloud providers: The company works with many of the major cloud providers to increase awareness of its products and make it easy to access its software. The company partners with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to offer Elastic Cloud on AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, respectively, through direct purchase from it or their respective marketplaces. The company also partners with other cloud providers to offer its free and paid proprietary features to users on their cloud platforms.
Systems integrators, channel partners, and referral partners: The company has a global network of systems integrators, channel partners, and referral partner relationships that help deliver its products to business and government customers around the world.
OEM and MSP partners: The company’s OEM and MSP partners embed an Elastic subscription into the products or services they offer to their customers. OEM and MSP partners are able to include Elastic’s proprietary features in their product, receive ongoing support from Elastic for product development, and receive support for end customer issues related to Elastic.
Technology partners: The company’s technology partners collaborate with Elastic to create a standardized solution for end users that includes technology from both Elastic and the partner. Technology partners represent a deeper collaboration than community contributions and are distinct from distribution-oriented relationships like OEM and MSP partners.
AI ecosystem: The company’s AI ecosystem provides customers with a curated, comprehensive set of AI technologies and tools integrated with the Elasticsearch vector database, designed to speed time-to-market, ROI delivery, and innovation. The Elastic AI Ecosystem includes integrations with Anthropic's Claude, Cohere, Confluent, Dataiku, DataRobot, Galileo, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Mistral AI, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Protect AI, RedHat, Vectorize.io, and Unstructured, along with all of the major hyperscalers, consisting of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft.
Services
The company offers consulting and training to assist customers in accelerating their success with its software. The company’s consulting team consists of engineers and architects who bring hands-on experience and deep technical knowledge to a project. The company’s training offerings enable its users to gain the skills necessary to develop, deploy, and manage its software.
Customer Support
The company endeavors to make it easy for users to download, install, deploy, and use its platform and its solutions. The company’s user community enables users to engage in self-help and collaboration.
However, in many situations, such as those involving complex enterprise IT environments, large deployments, and novel use cases, its users require its support. Accordingly, the company includes support as part of the subscriptions it sells for its products. The company’s global support organization consists of engineers who provide technical support services including troubleshooting, technical audits, cluster tuning, and upgrade assistance. The company’s support team is globally distributed and provides coverage 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, across multiple languages.
Competition
The company’s principal competitors include:
For Elasticsearch and other platform use cases: offerings, such as Apache Solr (open source offering), Lucidworks Fusion, and MongoDB Atlas, and search tools including Algolia, Coveo, Google, Pinecone, and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search.
For Elastic Observability: software vendors with specific observability solutions, such as AppDynamics (owned by Cisco Systems), Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Splunk (owned by Cisco Systems).
For Elastic Security: security vendors, such as Azure Sentinel (by Microsoft), CrowdStrike, Google SecOps, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk (owned by Cisco Systems).
Certain cloud hosting providers and managed service providers, including AWS, which offer products or services based on a forked version of the company’s platform.
Intellectual Property
As of April 30, 2025, the company had a number of active patents, issued in both the United States and outside of the United States, with expirations ranging from 2031 to 2042. In addition, as of April 30, 2025, the company had numerous U.S. and international trademark registrations.
In addition, the company’s technology incorporates software components licensed to the general public under open source software licenses, such as the Apache Software License Version 2.0 (‘Apache 2.0’) and other permissive licenses.
The Elastic design logo ‘Elastic’ and the company’s other registered or common law trademarks, service marks, or trade names appearing are the property of the company and its subsidiaries.
History
Elastic N.V. was founded in 2012. The company was incorporated in the Netherlands as a private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) in 2012.
