stooonks

Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.

× 🔎 Explain it

---

Elastic N.V.

Elastic sells software that helps companies search, analyze, and protect their data.

Elastic makes software that lets companies search through huge piles of data and spot patterns in it. Its main product, Elasticsearch, is like a super-powered search engine that a business installs on its own computers or rents from the cloud. Customers use it to power website search bars, dig through logs from thousands of servers, and watch for security threats in real time. The people who pay are mostly big companies and government agencies — anyone with more data than they can read by hand. Elastic charges them a subscription fee, either based on how many servers they run the software on or how much data they push through it.

Think of it as a librarian who has read every book in the building and can find any fact in a second — except the "books" are your emails, server logs, app clicks, and security alerts. About 40 percent of revenue comes from the "Elastic Cloud" offering, where Elastic runs everything for you on Amazon or Google's servers, and that is the fastest-growing slice. The rest comes from selling licenses and support to companies that run it themselves. Annual revenue is roughly $1.4 billion and growing about 17 percent a year.

The company started around 2012 when Shay Banon built a better search tool as a side project, then turned it into a business. Elastic has grown by adding security and observability products on top of search, and by buying smaller firms to fill gaps. It does not pay a dividend and does not buy back meaningful amounts of stock; instead it reinvests cash into research and sales, and occasionally makes acquisitions. In 2024, Elastic found itself in a legal fight with Amazon over the trademark on the word "Elastic," a reminder that even a name can become a battleground when the stakes are big.

Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026