Search company Elastic goes public and doubles its value on day 1

At the end of last week, on October 5, Elastic - the company behind the hugely popular ElasticSearch search tool - went public.

And it looks like the move public paid off. By the end of its first day as a public company, shares in Elastic had doubled in price. At the start of the day it was around $36 per share - by the close of trading it has leapt to $70. This meant its market cap had risen from $2.5 billion to $4.9 billion.

We probably shouldn't be surprised. As Fortune pointed out over the weekend, the demand for shares in Elastic was already getting pretty hot towards the end of September. "It originally filed to sell the stock at $26 to $29 apiece on Sept. 24, while Thursday’s pricing was higher even than banks managing the sale were expecting."

https://twitter.com/elastic/status/1048302021143670786

Elastic's journey to the stock market

ElasticSearch was first released back in February 2010. The tool contained the imprint of Elastic's mission - to make powerful search accessible to modern businesses. And it has certainly done just that. Today Elastic powers immensely popular apps like Uber and Tinder, as well as giving logging and processing power to companies like Cisco where big data has become the norm.

According to founder Shay Banon, writing in a blog post published on Friday, Elastic has seen "more than 350 million product downloads, a... community of more than 100,000 developers, and more than 5,500 customers."

What next for Elastic?

Banon insists that "as a public company, [Elastic] will continue doing the things that have made us Elastic."

This includes continued investment in the developer communities that have grown up around Elastic's products, new features to products and working with customers to adapt to changing trends in software infrastructure - so Elastic's products can be deployed anywhere.

Business as usual might well be a recipe for success for Elastic. Investors will be hoping that the organization continues to deliver on its mission, as demand for better, faster search isn't going to end any time soon.