Elastic
Leadership History
3 leaders · 2012 to present
Ashutosh (Ash) Kulkarni is the CEO of Elastic, in the role since 2022. The first chief executive was Steven Schuurman, from 2012.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ashutosh (Ash) Kulkarni | Chief Executive Officer | 2022 | Present | 4 |
| Shay Banon | Chief Executive Officer (now Chief Technology Officer) | 2017 | 2022 | 5 |
| Steven Schuurman | Chief Executive Officer | 2012 | 2017 | 5 |
Elastic is the commercial company behind Elasticsearch. Retailers use it for product search, banks and governments use it to store and search security logs, and engineering teams use it to troubleshoot outages from logs, metrics and traces. Since 2023 the company has repositioned around "Search AI," selling Elasticsearch as a vector database and retrieval engine for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. The parent, Elastic N.V., is incorporated in the Netherlands, but its executive office and largest operations are in the United States. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Elastic is a B2B software company with an open-core model. Its core Elasticsearch and Kibana code is free to download, and the company makes money by selling paid subscriptions that add advanced features (machine learning, security analytics, AI assistants, enterprise support) and by running the software for customers as Elastic Cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud customers pay largely based on consumption of compute and storage, so revenue grows as customers index and search more data. Subscriptions accounted for $1.634 billion of Elastic's $1.739 billion fiscal 2026 revenue; the rest came from professional services and training. Elastic packages the platform into three solutions: Search & AI (application search, RAG and vector search), Observability (logs, metrics, traces, APM) and Security (SIEM, XDR, endpoint protection).
Chief Executive Officer
2022 – Present
4 years (current)
Joined Elastic in 2019 as chief product officer and became CEO in January 2022; previously held product leadership roles at Akamai and McAfee. Led the Search AI repositioning and the push into large multi-year platform deals.
Chief Executive Officer (now Chief Technology Officer)
2017 – 2022
5 years
Banon executed the highly controversial decision to change Elasticsearch's licensing from fully open-source to the Server Side Public License (SSPL) to specifically block Amazon (AWS) from reselling the software.
As the creator of the core product, he served multiple stints as CEO, fiercely defending the company's intellectual property against massive tech giants attempting to monetize it for free.
Chief Executive Officer
2012 – 2017
5 years
Schuurman established the 'open core' business model, allowing the base Elasticsearch product to remain completely free while aggressively selling premium enterprise features (like security and machine learning).
As Co-Founder and the original CEO, he guided the company's early, explosive commercialization, securing the massive venture capital required to aggressively expand the sales team globally.
Elastic competes for observability budgets with Datadog, Dynatrace and Cisco-owned Splunk, and for security analytics spend with Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, CrowdStrike and Google Security Operations. Amazon's OpenSearch fork, created after Elastic's 2021 license change, gives AWS customers a cheaper managed alternative. In vector search, Elastic faces specialist databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate and Qdrant plus vector features inside MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Snowflake. Monthly self-serve cloud revenue grows more slowly than sales-led revenue, and GAAP operating results remain negative (a $33 million GAAP operating loss in FY2026). In June 2026 Elastic cut roughly 7% of its workforce as it reorganized around AI-driven productivity.
Ashutosh Kulkarni became Chief Executive Officer of Elastic in January 2022. An experienced enterprise software executive who joined Elastic as Chief Product Officer in 2021, Kulkarni previously served as Executive VP and GM at McAfee, Senior VP at Akamai Technologies, and held senior product leadership roles at Informatica.
Ashutosh Kulkarni accelerated Elastic Cloud SaaS expansion, spearheaded the launch of ES|QL, positioned Elasticsearch as the premier vector database for enterprise Generative AI, expanded enterprise go-to-market partnerships, and achieved consistent GAAP operating profitability.
Shay Banon created Elasticsearch in 2010 and co-founded Elastic in 2012, serving as CEO from 2017 to 2022. Banon led Elastic through its landmark 2018 NYSE IPO and unified the Elastic Stack, stepping down as CEO in 2022 to return to his passion as Chief Technology Officer and Chairman.
Steven Schuurman served as the inaugural CEO of Elastic from 2012 to 2017. A seasoned Dutch software entrepreneur who previously co-founded open-source company SpringSource (sold to VMware), Schuurman structured Elastic's corporate foundation and early commercial monetization.
CEO Ash Kulkarni leads Elastic's executive team alongside co-founder and CTO Shay Banon. The current list of officers, including the chief financial officer, is published on Elastic's investor relations governance page.
Elastic N.V. is governed under Dutch corporate law by a Board of Directors chaired by Shay Banon, with independent directors possessing deep enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, and financial leadership expertise.
Elastic operates under its foundational cultural document called the 'Elastic Source Code', centered on principles including: 'Humid, not wet', 'Home, Dinner', 'As YOU, Are', 'Space Time', and 'Speed, Scale, Relevance'.
Ashutosh Kulkarni's vision is to make Elastic the definitive data search and intelligence platform for the AI era, enabling every organization on earth to search, observe, and protect their mission-critical digital systems in real time.
Ashutosh Garg currently serves as CEO. He took over from the legendary founder Shay Banon, who deliberately stepped down from the CEO role to return to his roots as Chief Technology Officer, heavily focusing on integrating Generative AI (vector search) into the core engine.
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
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