Elastic

Elastic is a search, observability and security company founded in 2012. Its platform is designed to help organisations find answers in real time from all of their data at scale. The company describes itself as "The Search AI Company" and works across search technology, open source software, artificial intelligence, observability, security analytics and distributed systems.

The company's core product is the Elastic Stack (ELK), which combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash. Elasticsearch, the open source search and analytics engine at the centre of the stack, was originally written by founder Shay Banon to solve a recipe search problem; Kibana provides visualisation and exploration, Beats are lightweight data shippers, and Logstash handles data processing pipelines. The stack underpins enterprise search, log management, metrics analysis and security analytics, and is used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500.

Elastic employs a distributed team of "Elasticians" across more than 30 countries; an exact headcount is not stated. Open source development is central to the company's approach: it holds that the best products emerge from transparent, collaborative work, and it publishes the components of its stack as open source software.