Elastic NV (NYSE: ESTC) is an enterprise software company that sells subscriptions to a search AI platform built around Elasticsearch, its open source search and analytics engine. Revenue comes primarily from subscriptions, which accounted for 93% of total revenue of $1.483 billion in FY2025 (year ended April 30, 2025), delivered either as cloud-hosted services through Elastic Cloud or as self-managed software. Elastic competes against a range of search, observability, and security vendors including Splunk, Datadog, Microsoft, and open source alternatives. The company distributes software under an AGPL open source license as well as a proprietary license, using a community-driven adoption model where developers download and trial the software before entering commercial relationships. As of April 30, 2025, Elastic served approximately 21,500 customers globally. Customers outside the United States accounted for 44% of total revenue in FY2025. Shay Banon founded Elasticsearch and the company has since organized its platform into three solutions: Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security.
- Revenue model
- Subscription sales are the primary revenue source, at 93% of total revenue in FY2025 and FY2024 (92% in FY2023). Subscriptions are priced on a resource-based consumption model for cloud deployments and on annual or monthly contract terms for self-managed deployments. The remaining 7% of revenue comes from professional services. Elastic Cloud provides a hosted option across major cloud providers with a free trial but no permanent free tier.
- Products and services
- Elastic offers three solutions built on a common platform: Elasticsearch (search AI applications including generative AI, RAG, e-commerce search, and workplace search), Elastic Observability (log analytics, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring), and Elastic Security (threat detection, SIEM, endpoint security). The core platform features Elasticsearch as a distributed search engine and vector database, Kibana as a user interface, and native integrations with large language models for retrieval-augmented generation. R&D expense was $365.8 million in FY2025, $342.0 million in FY2024, and $313.5 million in FY2023.
- Customers and end markets
- Elastic had approximately 21,500 customers as of April 30, 2025, up from approximately 21,000 as of April 30, 2024 and approximately 20,200 as of April 30, 2023. Customers span enterprise IT, security operations, and developer teams across industries. The platform addresses use cases in enterprise search, log analytics, infrastructure monitoring, application performance, and cybersecurity. The company targets large enterprise customers, with seasonality weighted toward the fourth fiscal quarter.
- Value-chain role
- Elastic sits at the data retrieval and analytics layer of enterprise IT infrastructure, ingesting data from any source and format and providing search, analysis, and visualization. It functions as a vector database, search engine, log aggregator, and AI application backend. Elasticsearch is described in the filing as the most downloaded open source vector database. Elastic maintains a single code base shared between self-managed and cloud-hosted deployments.
- Geographic exposure
- Customers outside the United States accounted for 44% of total revenue in FY2025, 42% in FY2024, and 41% in FY2023. The company has a globally distributed engineering organization. The platform is available across major public cloud providers and supports hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
- Competitors
- Splunk, Datadog, Microsoft, open source search alternatives
