ElasticSearch announced $70M in Series C funding today just 18 months after forming the company. Company executives say they will use the money to continue to drive their phenomenal growth.
This round is being led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Additional funders include Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures. It brings total funding to date to $104M.
It’s said when a child grows quickly, it’s called a growth spurt. ElasticSearch, the open source search and data discovery platform has only been around for a year and a half as company (4+ as a product), but CEO Steven Schuurman, says it’s growing in leaps in bounds and VCs have noticed.
Schuurman says they are getting half a million downloads a month and over the last 6 months, they have been experiencing massive growth. “The reason why we felt compelled to raise another round is that we see demand growing explosively,” he said.
He added,  “We are signing up customers left, right and center, and people aren’t just kicking the tires. They are using product stack in production environments.”
Company CTO Shay Banon says ElasticSearch solves a real problem around search and discovery for companies  and that’s why so many companies are using it. He pointed out that it’s hard to find a social analytics company not using ElasticSearch under the hood and that Cisco just announced a network monitoring and security product based on ElasticSearch, as just a couple of examples.
One company using ElasticSearch is Nuxeo, an open source content management platform. Company CEO Eric Barroca, says his company started embedding ElasticSearch in the platform because it offered so many advantages. “First of all,” he said, ‘it offers super impressive performance and the ability to easily embed search as a service,” something that’s critical for his company’s product. He said it also enables his company to automate search and connect to it easily through the ElasticSearch API.
“ElasticSearch provides a massive performance boost on complex queries, and it’s blazingly fast,” he said. He was also impressed with its ability to take a query and aggregate a large set of results.
In fact, Banon explained that’s really ElasticSearch’s strength, the ability to query across huge stores of data and pull out results, then display them in ways that provide insight into the data. He offered Twitter as an example of how this could work.
Suppose you wanted to search for information about the 2012 election, you might search for Obama, Romney and Ohio. What you might not know, Banon explained, is that each tweet has about 100-150 attributes in metadata around it. When a person does a query in a data set as large as Twitter, it could come back with a million results or more.
As Barroca said, ElasticSearch doesn’t just give you a bunch of results, it aggregates them for you. Banon says there are sister products to the main search tool like Kibana, a visualization tool that lets you see the data in different ways such as a graph or histogram showing the number of hits per day or other pieces of data that breaks down the results in ways that make it more meaningful for a user.
Banon said this addressed a real pain point for enterprise searchers: Once you find the data, how do you make sense of it?
The company plans to use the infusion of cash to continue to build out its operation in the US, Europe and Asia to give it coverage wherever it has a user base. Schuurman says, Japan is one of the fastest growing markets right now.
As part of the funding deal, NEA General Partner Harry Weller will get a seat on the ElasticSearch Board of Directors.
