Shay Banon

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is released as open source under the terms of the Apache License. Official clients are available in Java, .NET (C#), Python, Groovy and many other languages. Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine followed by Apache Solr, also based on Lucene.

Elasticsearch is developed alongside a data-collection and log-parsing engine called Logstash, and an analytics and visualisation platform called Kibana. The three products are designed for use as an integrated solution, referred to as the "Elastic Stack" (Formerly the "ELK stack").

Shay Banon created the precursor to Elasticsearch, called Compass, in 2004. While thinking about the third version of Compass he realized that it would be necessary to rewrite big parts of Compass to "create a scalable search solution". So he created "a solution built from the ground up to be distributed" and used a common interface, JSON over HTTP, suitable for programming languages other than Java as well. Shay Banon released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010.

Elasticsearch BV was founded in 2012 to provide commercial services and products around Elasticsearch and related software. In June 2014, the company announced raising $70 million in a Series C funding round, just 18 months after forming the company. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Additional funders include Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures. This round brings total funding to $104M.