Elasticsearch, a leader in big data search and analytics, today announced it has secured $10 million in Series A financing led by Benchmark Capital. The other investors in the round include Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective.

The company will use its initial round of funding to rapidly build out the organization in all functional areas and expand into key geographic regions to support the explosive adoption of Elasticsearch, the open source search and analytics software that has emerged as one of the most popular open source projects in the big data market and is already being used by thousands of companies all over the world.

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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 /month, making it one of the fastest growing open source projects in its market.

"Benchmark moves lightning fast on investments when we see the combination of explosive technology adoption and a founding team that radiates technical excellence," said Peter Fenton, general partner, Benchmark Capital. "Similar to companies in which we invested such as RedHat, MySQL and SpringSource, Elasticsearch quickly rocketed to 200,000 downloads per month and Shay's magnetic energy in delivering a simple, and highly usable solution for extracting meaning and information from big data sets the company apart from the current market hype and hyperbole."

"In just four months, Elasticsearch is already light years ahead of where even the most successful open source companies were at the same stage," said Rod Johnson. "Shay and Steven Schuurman 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."

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.

"Elasticsearch is designed specifically to tackle the challenge of searching billions of documents or events in real-time, and extracting information out of structured and unstructured data is in our sweet spot," said Shay Banon. "This breakthrough capability, combined with its ease of use, explains why people love using Elasticsearch."

"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," said Steven Schuurman, Elasticsearch co-founder and CEO. "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% commitment to maximizing the success for anyone who uses Elasticsearch."

About Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a real-time big data search and analytics company that develops and supports Elasticsearch, a popular and rapidly growing open source solution. Used by thousands of enterprises in virtually every vertical market, Elasticsearch revolutionizes big data search and analytics 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. For more information, visit www.elasticsearch.com.