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Elasticsearch, a big data search and analytics startup, announced it has secured $10 million in Series A financing led by Benchmark Capital to help build out its analytics engine and more.
In addition to Benchmark, other investors in the round include Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective. Elasticsearch said it will use this initial round of funding to help build out the organization in all functional areas and expand into key geographic regions to support the adoption of Elasticsearch. The open-source search and analytics software emerged in the last six months as one of the more popular open-source projects in the big data market and is already being used by thousands of companies all over the world, the company said.
Elasticsearch’s forte is that it revolutionizes big data information retrieval by empowering anyone to turn it into valuable information to improve business results. Elasticsearch provides enterprise-grade technical production support, development support, consulting and training for enterprises, systems integrators and software vendors worldwide.
Organizations of every size are struggling to find an easy way to extract information from their large distributed volumes of structured and unstructured data. While there are a number of proven technologies for storing the exploding volumes of data, there is no user-friendly and simple way to quickly search through petabytes of information to deliver the exact information that businesses require to make real-time, intelligent and actionable decisions, the company said.
Created by Elasticsearch co-founder and CTO Shay Banon, the open-source product was first released in 2009 and has already been downloaded 1.5 million times, including a current rate of 200,000 per month, making it one of the top open-source projects in the world, according to the company. Steven Schuurman, a co-founder of SpringSource , where he served as senior vice president of worldwide service delivery, also co-founded Elasticsearch. Prior to Elasticsearch, Banon was director of technology at Gigaspaces Technologies.
“In just four months, Elasticsearch is already lights years ahead of where even the most successful open-source companies were at the same stage,” said Rod Johnson. “Shay and Steven have hit on the perfect storm, a user-friendly product that can quickly search and extract information from massive amounts of data stored in the most complex distributed cloud environments.”
Peter Fenton led Benchmark Capital’s investment in Elasticsearch. Fenton has had a series of big hits in the open-source startup world, including investments in JBoss, SpringSource and Zimbra. Red Hat acquired JBoss, VMware acquired SpringSource and Yahoo acquired Zimbra. He also invested in Wily Technology (acquired by CA Technologies), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco), Coremetrics (acquired by IBM) and Xensource (acquired by Citrix).
“Our ability to attract investments from visionary open-source leaders like Peter Fenton and Rod Johnson highlights the enormous opportunity we have as a company,” Schuurman said in a statement. “In my 12 years in the software industry, I have never seen a product have such an immediate impact on customers as Elasticsearch, and its adoption continues to increase daily. With this Series A round, we will continue to invest our resources in extending its value and maintain our 100 percent commitment to maximizing the success for anyone who uses Elasticsearch.”
In a post on the Elasticsearch blog, Schuurman said Elasticsearch is so popular because it is easy to use, robust and complete.
“When Shay and I joined forces about six months ago, we set out to build a company based on our shared belief that we would be able to create a beacon of light in our industry,” Schuurman wrote. “Our industry, mostly referred to as the big data market, is undeniably complex and extraordinary technology-heavy. Many companies provide a solution that solves one of the many technical challenges companies are facing when aiming to gain competitive advantage from the massive volumes of data it’s gathering on a daily basis. I believe that up until Shay created Elasticsearch, very few–if any–of the solutions available were able to make achieving this objective as easy as operating an Apple device.”