Shares of the enterprise search software company Elastic N.V. soared more than 19% in extended trading today after the company delivered fiscal first-quarter results that easily beat Wall Street’s targets.
The company reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 70 cents per share, breezing past the analyst consensus estimate of 58 cents. Revenue for the quarter rose 15% from a year earlier, to $478 million, topping the Street’s $470 million forecast.
It was a strong showing by Elastic, and it helped the company to improve its bottom line. Although it still posted a net loss of $16.7 million for the quarter, that was a big improvement on the $24.6 million loss it reported in the same quarter a year ago.
Elastic might not be a household name, but it’s well-known in the enterprise. It’s the company behind the open-source search engine called Elasticsearch, which is used by thousands of midsized and larger businesses all over the world. Elastic makes the platform free to download, monetizing it by selling a special, cloud-hosted version with premium features. It also has a growing business selling application observability and threat detection tools.
In recent months, Elastic has tried to position Elasticsearch as a useful platform for feeding massive amounts of real-time data into large language models to give them the business context they need to make decisions. In a statement, Elastic Chief Executive Ash Kulkarni (pictured) said this strategy has really begun to pay off for the company.
“Elastic delivered a strong start to fiscal 2027, beating our guidance across all key metrics,” he added. “AI is reshaping the enterprise technology stack, and organizations are making deliberate choices about where to build and how to observe and secure their applications and data.”
Elastic had plenty of other encouraging figures that reflect the healthy state of its business. It said current remaining performance obligations, which are used as a measure of future revenue, rose by 21% to $1.153 billion at the end of the quarter. Meanwhile, the number of customers now spending at least $100,000 on its tools each year rose to more than 1,800, up from 1,550 a year earlier.
The strong quarter will give investors confidence that Elastic is capable of reaccelerating its growth, said Michael Ni, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. He wasn’t just impressed by Elastic’s improving revenue, but also its 18% growth in sales-led subscription revenue, its 21% growth in its current remaining performance obligations, and its 27% growth in overall RPO.
“These are forward indicators that show Elastic is gaining momentum at a time when the market is still trying to sort out which software companies will benefit from AI and which will be displaced by it,” Ni said. “Elastic is doing well so far, but the Street is still in wait-and-see mode regarding its combination of search, telemetry, security and data retrieval, and whether that gives it a structural advantage over its peers in the AI operational data layer market. If Elastic can turn this common data foundation into a strong cross-sell and higher-value AI workloads, there’s more upside than what we saw in this quarter.”
During the quarter, Elastic bought a startup called Deductive AI Inc., which had developed an AI-enabled investigation platform that engineering teams can use to identify and resolve production issues faster. The company, which paid a reported $85 million, plans to integrate those capabilities to the Elastic Observability platform.
Moving onto guidance, Elastic said it anticipates second quarter revenue of between $486 million and $487 million. That compares with the Street’s target of $483 million. For the full year, Elastic is projecting sales of between $1.998 billion and $2.010 billion. That’s better than the Street’s guidance too, with analysts predicting annual sales of just $1.99 billion.
Some investors appear to have anticipated Elastic might have a good quarter. The company’s stock had gained more than 5% during the regular trading session, prior to today’s results and the after-hours jump. Following those gains, Elastic’s shares are now up 11% in the year to date.