Elastic is a search software company that has filed to go public (SEC filing). Elastic helps developers embed search functions into their own apps. Elastic plans to debut on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol “ESTC.”
It’s worth mentioning that this company is not connected to Amazon, which has its own service called Elasticsearch. “Amazon competes with us for potential customers, and while Amazon cannot provide our proprietary software, the pricing of Amazon’s offerings may limit our ability to adjust the price of our products,” said Elastic in a filing.
Elastic generates revenue through subscriptions of the commercialized version of the Elasticsearch open-source software. Some of its customers include Adobe, Merck, Sprint, Uber, and Walgreens.
Elastic recently reported that its sales increased 79% to $56.6 million for the last quarter. However, Elastic saw a net loss of $18.6 million due to increases in R&D and sales and marketing costs. For the full year ended April 30th, Elastic saw its revenue increased 81% to $159.9 million and loss was at $52.7 million.
What makes Elastic’s IPO filing compelling is that it is another win for the open source community. Other companies that offer open source software platforms that went public include Cloudera, Hortonworks and MuleSoft. Salesforce ended up acquiring MuleSoft for $6.5 billion this year and Microsoft also acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion.
Elastic’s cloud-based platform can be set up and managed by the customers themselves. And Elastic’s software has been downloaded more than 350 million times since it launched in 2013.
Some of Elastic’s competitors include Amazon, Google, and Splunk. However, Elastic also has a partnership in place with Google — which has Elastic’s search enabled on its cloud. The company also has similar relationships with Alibaba, Microsoft, and IBM.
Elastic was founded in Amsterdam in 2012 and the company is now based in Mountain View, California. The company now has nearly 1,000 employees.
In the filing, there is a placeholder that says the company is looking to raise as much as $100 million. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, and RBC Capital Markets are the lead underwriters for the deal. Some of Elastic’s investors include Benchmark, Index Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates.
