UPDATED 15:29 EDT / SEPTEMBER 05 2018

BIG DATA

Enterprise search engine powerhouse Elastic files to go public

Hot on the heels of a report that claimed Elasticsearch BV had secretly submitted preliminary paperwork for a stock market debut, the company today officially filed to go public.

The move comes six years after it first opened for business in Amsterdam. The company, which is now headquartered in California and does business as Elastic, develops search and analytics software for the enterprise. Elastic claims that its products have been downloaded more than 350 million times since 2013.

The company is best known as the maker of the Elasticsearch search engine, which does for organizations’ internal data what Google does for the web. Elastic offers the platform as part of a bundle called the Elastic Stack that also includes three other data management tools. Among them is the Kibana visualization tool, the Logstack engine for ingesting records from external sources and Beats, another data aggregation system.

All four offerings are open-source. Elastic makes money from the bundle with a commercial version that includes advanced features for enterprises, including a machine learning capability added last year that can find anomalies in real-time data streams.

Today’s IPO filing reveals that Elastic has more than paying 5,500 customers. That’s up from about 5,000 on April 31, which is when company’s 2018 fiscal year ended, and about 2,800 at the end of fiscal 2017.

This rapid growth is clearly reflected in Elastic’s top line. According to the filing, the company saw revenue jump from $88.2 million in 2017 to $159.9 million in the 2018 fiscal year. In the most recent quarter, sales grew 79 percent year-over-year, to $56.6 million.

Elastic has been burning through a lot of cash to keep up the momentum. The company recorded a net loss of $52.7 million during fiscal year, slightly up from $52 million the year prior. But the fact that losses have stayed relatively flat even as revenue nearly doubled shows that Elastic is strengthening its bottom line, something potential IPO investors will no doubt consider.

The filing indicates that the company hopes to raise $100 million in the stock sale. This figure is often used by a placeholder before firms determine their real funding goal, which means there’s a good chance it will be more than that.

The Recode report that broke Elastic’s IPO plans in June cited sources as saying the company is aiming to achieve a valuation of between and $1.5 billion and $3 billion. At the time, it was expected that Elastic would hit the stock market in late summer or early fall. The company said that it plans to debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ESTC.

Elastic’s filing comes just a week after SurveyMonkey Inc., a maker of tools for gathering customer feedback, submitted the paperwork for its own public offering. The duo will follow the long list of tech firms that have already hit the stock exchange as part of the industry’s recent IPO wave.

Image: Elastic

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