Open Source Elasticsearch Firm Raises $24M
Amsterdam-based Big Data search startup Elasticsearch announced it just closed on a Series B round of funding valued at $24 million.
Index Ventures headed the round, which was backed by Benchmark Capital, an existing investor, and newcomer SV Angel. The funds, which follow a $10 million capital injection in November, will be used to help transform the company from a software provider to a full-fledged services and support organization.
Elasticsearch also revealed that its open source real-time search and analytics software just crossed the 2 million download mark.
“Since we founded the company, the demand for our support and training offerings has experienced explosive growth. On a tactical level it’s vital we attract the best talent to support our customers and deliver on our product engineering ambitions as the adoption of Elasticsearch continues to accelerate,” said CEO Steven Schuurman, in a company statement.
“On a more strategic level, this round of investment frees us to execute on our vision, whilst adding an invaluable board member to the team,” Schuurman added.
Elasticsearch is a distributed, “schema-less” scalable search platform with integrated real-time analytics that can enable Big Data search capabilities, according to the company. Already, the technology powers some high-profile, next-generation social search projects.
“What Elasticsearch made possible with its first release in 2009 (search beyond free text search), is now being adopted by some of the most data-intensive organizations in the world. Next-generation social network Path very recently announced advanced search functionality in their platform, and as recently as mid-January, Facebook launched its much-discussed Graph Search functionality,” wrote Schuurman and Elasticsearch CTO Shay Banon in a company blog post.
The executives hint that the company will be working on boosting the platform's robustness. “We know of various companies that use Elasticsearch to drive Google Analytics-like features and can't afford for its service to be disrupted,” they wrote.
With an increasing number of businesses putting their Elasticsearch-powered apps into production environments, the technology needs to keep up with the demand placed on it.
“As Elasticsearch is playing a more and more mission-critical part in the stacks of many organizations worldwide, we feel very responsible for the reliability of our product. That means we are engineering Elasticsearch in such a way and are adding new features that make it more dependable even in distressed situations, so that anyone using the product can sleep well at night, knowing that Elasticsearch takes care of your data,” blogged Schuurman and Banon.
Elasticsearch joins several other technology firms whose coffers are benefiting from a venture capital scene focused on Big Data startups.
Last week, New York City-based Sailthru raised $19 million for its “personalized” take on Big Data-driven marketing services. Earlier this month DataXu banked $27 million to grow its marketing platform, which uses Big Data analytics to zero-in on prospective customers and optimize media spending.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
