Elastic Search IPO: What It Means for Search and Big Data

Elastic Search IPO

Elastic, the company behind the Elasticsearch search engine, went public today on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "ESTC."

In a statement on its website, Elastic thanked its users, customers, and partners for their support.

Hello, today we embark on a journey as a public company. We are proud to announce that Elastic Search is listed on the NYSE with the ticker "ESTC."

When Elasticsearch was first released on February 8, 2010, the vision was that search would be more than just a search box on a website. The company began storing increasing amounts of data—both structured and unstructured—from many sources such as databases, websites, applications, and mobile and connected devices. The goal was to give users a new way to interact with their data, offering speed, real‑time results, massive scale, and relevance.

Over the past six years, Elasticsearch has seen more than 350 million product downloads, a developer community of over 100 000 members, and more than 5 500 customers. Companies like Uber, Instacart, and Tinder rely on Elastic to match drivers with riders, provide relevant shopping results, or suggest potential matches. Traditional IT, operations, and security teams at organizations such as Cisco, Sprint, and Indiana University use Elastic to aggregate pricing, quote, and business data, process billions of log events daily, monitor website performance, and support network‑security operations.

As a public company, Elastic will continue to invest in the global developer community, its DNA, and the Elastic Stack, adding new features and solutions. Users can deploy Elastic products on‑premises, in public clouds, or via Elastic Cloud. The company remains committed to open‑source code and hiring humble, proactive, balanced talent to help customers succeed.

Thank you to everyone who made this day possible.

Elasticsearch was founded in 2012 and is known for its open‑source search product, the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash), commercial X‑Pack features, and the SaaS offering Elastic Cloud (managed Elasticsearch, application search, and website search). It helps enterprises search massive unstructured information databases and, using machine learning, automatically detects anomalies, performs root‑cause analysis, and reduces false positives in real‑time applications.

Today, Elasticsearch serves over 5 000 customers in more than 80 countries. In fiscal year 2018 it generated $160 million in revenue, with 93 % coming from subscription fees and 39 % of revenue from outside the United States.

Notable customers include Cisco, eBay, Goldman Sachs, NASA, Microsoft, the Wikimedia Foundation, Samsung, and many others, with total downloads exceeding 100 million. Google Cloud also offers a fully managed version of Elasticsearch.

Following the IPO announcement, the stock price surged sharply, and industry analysts expressed excitement about Elasticsearch’s public listing.