ESTC · Read the filing

estc-20260430

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FORM 10-K

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended April 30, 2026

For the transition period from to

Commission File Number 001-38675

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elastic N.V.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Not Applicable1

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: Not Applicable1

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on which registered

Ordinary shares, Par Value €0.01 Per Share ESTC New York Stock Exchange

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐ No ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐

Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐

Emerging growth company ☐

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒

1 We are a distributed company. Accordingly, we do not have a principal executive office. For purposes of compliance with applicable requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, any shareholder communication required to be sent to our principal executive offices may be directed to the email address ir@elastic.co or to Elastic N.V., 88 Kearny St., Floor 19, San Francisco, CA 94108.

The aggregate market value of the ordinary shares held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based on the closing price of the ordinary shares on the New York Stock Exchange on October 31, 2025 (the last business day of the registrant’s second fiscal quarter), was approximately $9.4 billion.

As of May 29, 2026, the registrant had 103,951,633 ordinary shares, par value €0.01 per share, outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s definitive proxy statement relating to the registrant’s 2026 annual general meeting of shareholders are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K where indicated. Such definitive proxy statement will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the registrant’s fiscal year ended April 30, 2026.

Table of Contents

Page

PART I

Item 1. Business 5

Item 1A. Risk Factors 16

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 49

Item 1C. Cybersecurity 49

Item 2. Properties 50

Item 3. Legal Proceedings 50

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 51

PART II

Item 6. [Reserved] 53

Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 68

Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 69

Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 105

Item 9B. Other Information 106

Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 106

PART III

Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 107

Item 11. Executive Compensation 107

Item 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services 107

PART IV

Item 15. Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules 108

Table of Contents

General

Unless the context otherwise indicates, references in this report to the terms “Elastic,” “the Company,” “we,” “our,” and “us” refer to Elastic N.V. individually and together with its consolidated subsidiaries.

All information presented herein is based on our fiscal calendar. Unless otherwise stated, references to particular years, quarters, months, or periods refer to the Company’s fiscal years ended April 30 and the associated quarters, months, and periods within those fiscal years. We refer to our fiscal year ended April 30, 2026 as “fiscal 2026,” to our fiscal year ended April 30, 2025 as “fiscal 2025,” and to our fiscal year ended April 30, 2024 as “fiscal 2024.”

Trademarks

The Elastic design logo “Elastic” and our other registered or common law trademarks, service marks, or trade names appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of Elastic N.V. and its subsidiaries. Other trademarks and trade names referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of their respective owners. Solely for convenience, trademarks and trade names referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K may appear without the ® or TM symbols.

Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), which involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “might,” “will,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “potential,” or “continue” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans, or intentions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include, but are not limited to, statements about:

•our business strategy and our plan to build our business;

•the impact of macroeconomic conditions, including declining rates of economic growth, inflationary pressures, changing interest rates, changes in U.S. federal spending, evolving international trade policies and environments, and other conditions discussed in this report on information technology (“IT”) spending, sales cycles, and other factors affecting the demand for our offerings and our results of operations;

•our product offerings, initiatives, and investments involving artificial intelligence (“AI”) as well as the competitive landscape, market understanding and valuation, and regulatory scrutiny of AI technologies;

•our future financial performance, including our expectations regarding our revenue, cost of revenue, gross profit or gross margin, operating expenses (which include changes in sales and marketing, research and development, and general and administrative expenses), and our ability to achieve and maintain profitability;

•our ability to continue to deliver and improve our offerings and successfully develop new offerings;

•customer acceptance and purchase of our existing offerings and new offerings, including expanding adoption of our cloud-based offerings;

•the impact of geopolitical conditions and turmoil on our business and on the businesses of our customers and partners, including their spending priorities;

•the impact that increased adoption of consumption-based arrangements could have on our revenue or operating results;

•the impact of changes to our licensing of our products, particularly Elasticsearch and Kibana;

•our assessments of the strength of our solutions and products;

•our service performance and security, including the resources and costs required to prevent, detect, and remediate potential cybersecurity incidents and other information security breaches;

•our ability to maintain and expand our user and customer base;

•continued development of the market for our products;

•competition from other products and companies with more resources, recognition, and presence in our industry;

•the impact of foreign currency exchange rate and interest rate fluctuations on our results;

Table of Contents

•the pace of change and innovation in the markets in which we operate, including the rapid evolution of technology affecting our offerings and platform, such as AI, and the competitive nature of those markets;

•our ability to effectively manage our growth, including any changes to our pace of hiring;

•our international expansion strategy;

•our strategy of acquiring complementary businesses and our ability to successfully integrate acquired businesses and technologies;

•the impact of acquisitions on our future product offerings;

•our objectives and expectations for future operations;

•our relationships with and reliance on third parties, including partners;

•our ability to protect our intellectual property rights;

•our ability to develop our brands;

•the impact on our results of operations of expensing stock options and other equity awards;

•the adequacy of our capital resources;

•our ability to successfully defend litigation brought against us;

•our ability to successfully execute our go-to-market strategy, including the positioning of our solutions and products, and to expand in our existing markets and into new markets;

•the adequacy of our liquidity sources to meet our cash requirements for at least the next 12 months and thereafter;

•our ability to comply with laws and regulations that currently apply or may become applicable to our business, both in the United States and internationally;

•the impact that changes in tax laws could have on our estimated effective tax rates;

•our ability to attract and retain qualified employees and key personnel;

•the effect of the loss of key personnel;

•our expectations about the impact of natural disasters and public health epidemics and pandemics on our business, results of operations, and financial condition;

•the seasonality of our business;

•the future trading prices of our ordinary shares;

•the expected timing, amount, and effect of our share repurchases; and

•our ability to service our debt obligations.

In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and while we believe this information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, the information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and subject to the risks and other factors described in the section titled “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A and elsewhere in this report. Among other limitations, our forward-looking statements may not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments that we may make. As a result, investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events or circumstances on the date as of which such statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements after the date as of which they are made or to conform such statements to actual results or revised expectations, except as required by law. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements.

Table of Contents

Risk Factors Summary

The following is a summary of the key risks and uncertainties associated with our business, industry, and ownership of our ordinary shares. The summary below does not contain all of the information that may be important to you, and you should read this summary together with the more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties we face, which are set forth in Part I, “Item 1A—Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

•If we do not appropriately manage our future growth or are unable to improve our systems and processes, our business and results of operations may be adversely affected.

•We have a history of losses and may not be able to achieve profitability on a consistent basis.

•IT spending, sales cycles, and other factors affecting the demand for our offerings and our results of operations have been, and may continue to be, negatively impacted by current macroeconomic conditions, including declining rates of economic growth, inflationary pressures, increased interest rates, changes in U.S. federal government spending, evolving international trade policies and environments, geopolitical turmoil, and other conditions discussed in this report.

•Our business, reputation, or financial results may be adversely affected by any failure by us to be successful in our AI initiatives, by significant competition we face in the AI landscape, and by uncertain market understanding and valuation of AI and machine learning technologies, and ethical and regulatory issues relating to the use of AI in our offerings may result in new or enhanced governmental or regulatory scrutiny, reputational harm, damage to our competitive position, and liability.

•The use of AI by our workforce may present risks to our business.

•We and our third-party vendors are vulnerable to cybersecurity risks and incidents that may disrupt or damage our business.

•Our future growth, business, and results of operations will be harmed if we are not able to keep pace with technological and competitive developments, increase sales of our subscriptions to new and existing customers, renew existing customers’ subscriptions, respond effectively to evolving markets, offer high-quality support services, or maintain and enhance our brand.

•We may not be able to expand adoption of, or realize expected return on investments in, our cloud-based offerings.

•Our operating results may fluctuate from quarter to quarter.

•Our consumption-based arrangements for our Elastic Cloud offerings make it difficult to accurately predict the long-term rate of customer adoption or renewal, or the impact those arrangements will have on our near-term or long-term revenue and operating results.

•Because we recognize the vast majority of our revenue from subscriptions, downturns or upturns in sales are not immediately reflected in full in our results of operations.

•We expect our revenue mix to vary over time.

•We may not be able to attract and retain key employees or effectively develop and expand our sales, marketing, and customer support capabilities.

•We may not be able to realize the benefits of our marketing strategies, such as where we offer some of our product features free of charge and provide free trials to some of our paid features.

•Our international business exposes us to a variety of risks, and if we are not successful in sustaining and expanding our international business, we may incur additional losses and our revenue growth could be harmed.

•We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates.

•We are subject to risks associated with our receipt of revenue from sales to government entities.

•If our partners, including cloud providers, systems integrators, channel partners, referral partners, original equipment manufacturing (“OEM”) and managed service provider (“MSP”) partners, and technology partners fail to perform, or we are unable to maintain successful relationships with them, our ability to market, sell, and distribute our solution may be limited.

•We could be negatively impacted if the source code licenses under which some of our software is licensed are not enforceable.

Table of Contents

•Our reputation could be harmed if third parties offer inadequate or defective implementations of software that we have previously made available under an open source license.

•Limited technological barriers to entry into the markets in which we compete may facilitate entry by other enterprises into our markets to compete with us.

•A real or perceived defect, security vulnerability, error, or performance failure in our software could cause us to lose revenue, damage our reputation, and expose us to financial liability.

•Interruptions or performance problems, and our reliance on technologies from third parties, may adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

•Incorrect implementation or use of our software could negatively affect our business, operations, financial results, and growth prospects.

•Failure to protect our proprietary technology and intellectual property rights could substantially harm our business and results of operations.

•We could incur substantial costs as a result of any claim of infringement, misappropriation, or violation of another party’s intellectual property rights, including as a result of the indemnity provisions in various agreements.

•Our use of third-party open source software within our products could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to litigation.

•An investment in our company is subject to tax risks based on our status as a non-U.S. corporation.

•Any actual or perceived failure by us to comply with regulations or any other obligations relating to privacy, data protection, or information security could adversely affect our business.

•Our business is subject to a variety of government and industry regulations, as well as other obligations including compliance with export control, trade sanctions, anti-bribery, anti-corruption, and anti-money laundering laws.

•The market price for our ordinary shares has been, and is likely to continue to be, volatile.

•We may fail to meet our publicly announced guidance or other expectations about our business.

•The concentration of our share ownership with insiders will likely limit your ability to influence corporate matters, and the issuance of additional shares will dilute all other shareholders.

•Holders of our ordinary shares may not be able to exercise pre-emptive rights and may experience dilution upon future issuances of ordinary shares.

•Dutch law and our articles of association include anti-takeover provisions, and we do not comply with all suggested governance provisions of the Dutch Corporate Governance Code (“DCGC”).

•We do not intend to pay cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

•Claims of U.S. civil liabilities may not be enforceable against us.

•Our share repurchase program may not be fully consummated, could increase volatility of the price of our shares, and could diminish our cash reserves.

•If industry or financial analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, or if they issue inaccurate or unfavorable research regarding our ordinary shares, our share price and trading volume could decline.

•We have a substantial amount of indebtedness and may not be able to generate sufficient cash to service all of our indebtedness.

•We may not benefit from our acquisition strategy.

•Our reputation or business could be negatively impacted by environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) matters and our reporting of such matters.

•We may fail to maintain an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting.

Table of Contents

PART I

Item 1. Business

Overview

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables its customers to transform data into answers, actions, and outcomes with Search AI. While search technology revolutionized information retrieval through its ability to instantly return relevant results from massive datasets, it struggles when it comes to understanding context and generating insights. AI, on the other hand, excels at analyzing complex patterns and generating insights, but it lacks the ability to find and access specific information within vast data stores. The Elasticsearch Platform (“our platform”) combines the precision of search with the intelligence of AI to help our customers and community solve real-time business problems, unlock potential value, and achieve better outcomes. Our platform, available as either a cloud service or a self-managed software, allows our customers to find insights and drive AI and machine learning use cases from large amounts of data.

We offer three Elasticsearch-powered solutions—Search & AI, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security—that are built on our platform. We help organizations, their employees, and their customers find what they need faster, while keeping mission-critical applications and infrastructure running smoothly and protecting against cyber threats.

As digital transformation continues to drive mission-critical business functions towards increasingly complex data landscapes, we believe that every company must incorporate search AI capabilities across IT and line-of-business organizations to find the answers that matter from all of its data in real time and at scale.

Our platform is able to ingest data from any source, in any format, and perform search, analysis, and visualization of that data. With Elasticsearch at its core, our platform is a highly scalable document store, columnar database, and search engine and is the unified data store for all of our solutions and use cases. Featuring a common, solution-agnostic user interface with an embedded AI agent and support for third-party AI agents, our platform offers powerful drag-and-drop visual analytics, centralized management capabilities, and the world's most downloaded open source vector database, which gives developers a full suite of sophisticated retrieval algorithms and the ability to integrate with large language models (“LLM”). It delivers the comprehensive set of capabilities developers need to build, maintain, and secure next-generation applications and services. In addition, our out-of-the-box solutions (Elastic Observability and Elastic Security) deliver fast time-to-value for common use cases and, paired with our developer-centric platform which is extensible and customizable, allow us to innovate quickly and differentiate our offerings at every level.

We make our platform available as a service across major cloud providers (consisting of Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), Google Cloud Platform (“GCP”), and Microsoft Azure (“Azure”)) in more than 55 public cloud regions globally. Customers can also deploy our platform across hybrid clouds, public or private clouds, and multi-cloud environments.

Our business model is based primarily on a combination of paid service offerings (Elastic Cloud Hosted and Elastic Cloud Serverless) and free and paid proprietary self-managed software (Elastic Self-Managed). Our paid offerings for our platform are sold via subscription through resource-based pricing, and all customers and users have access to varying levels of features across all solutions. In Elastic Cloud, our family of cloud-based offerings, we offer various subscription tiers tied to different features. For users who download our software, we make some of the features of our software available free of charge, allowing us to engage with a broad community of developers and practitioners and introduce them to the value of our platform.

We believe in the importance of an open software development model, and we develop the majority of our software in public repositories under an open source GNU Affero General Public License v3 (“AGPL”) license, as well as under a proprietary license. Unlike some companies, we do not build an enterprise version that is separate from our free distribution. We maintain a single code base across both our self-managed software and Elastic-hosted services. All of these actions help us build a powerful commercial business model that we believe is optimized for product-driven growth. Elastic has always been committed to open source and an open development process with transparent and direct engagement with our community. The core of Elasticsearch and Kibana (a user interface) are open source under an AGPL license, and our open source code is housed in public repositories.

Our customers often significantly expand their usage of our products and services over time. Expansion includes increasing the number of developers and practitioners using our products, increasing the utilization of our products for a particular use case, and utilizing our products to address new use cases. We focus some of our direct sales efforts on encouraging this type of expansion within our customer base, both within as well as across solutions. Because our business model provides access to all solutions with resource-based pricing, we make it easy for customers to expand across use cases.

Table of Contents

Our business has experienced significant growth around the world. Our total revenue was $1.739 billion, $1.483 billion, and $1.267 billion for the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 17% for the years ended April 30, 2026 and 2025. Subscriptions accounted for 94% of our total revenue for the year ended April 30, 2026 and 93% of our total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2025 and 2024. Revenue from customers located outside the United States accounted for 46%, 44%, and 42% of our total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024, respectively.

We recorded net income of $367.8 million for the year ended April 30, 2026, net loss of $108.1 million for the year ended April 30, 2025, and net income of $61.7 million for the year ended April 30, 2024. We may incur net losses in the future. Our net cash provided by operating activities was $326.9 million, $266.2 million, and $148.8 million for the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024 respectively.

Our Products

Our products enable our customers and users to find relevant information and insights nearly instantly in large amounts of data across a broad range of business and consumer use cases.

Our platform includes a powerful set of solutions able to ingest and store data from any source, in any format, and perform search, analysis, and visualization, usually in milliseconds. Our platform can be used by developers and IT decision makers to power a variety of use cases. We also offer software solutions built on our platform that address a wide variety of use cases. Our platform and each of our solutions (Search & AI, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security) are designed to run as self-managed software or as a cloud service (in public or private clouds, in hybrid environments, or in multi-cloud environments).

Elasticsearch Platform

At its core, our platform is powered by Elasticsearch—a distributed, real-time vector database and analytics engine and data store for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Our platform includes a user interface (known as “Kibana”) that is the visualization layer for data stored in Elasticsearch; this layer is also the management and configuration interface for all parts of our platform.

Elastic has spent years infusing its platform with a strong foundational suite of AI and machine learning capabilities—from support for external machine learning models to native vector search capabilities, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and solution capabilities that improve search relevance and identify anomalies. Elastic enables organizations by providing the most complete data platform for context engineering and AI. Our commitment to transparency and flexibility ensures that organizations have the visibility and control necessary to integrate AI into workflows with confidence.

Paid features enable capabilities such as automating anomaly detection on time-series data at scale through machine learning, generating embeddings using state-of-the-art models, and performing inference with LLMs. Our platform further facilitates compliance with data security and privacy regulations, supporting search across low-cost cold and frozen data tiers, and allowing real-time notifications and alerts. The source code of features included as part of our platform is generally visible to the public in the form of “open source.”

Our Solutions

We have built a number of solutions into our platform to make it easier for organizations to use our software for common use cases. Our solutions include the following:

•Search & AI. Powered by Elasticsearch, Search & AI includes context engineering and AI, combining a scalable distributed data store, vector database, hybrid search, embedding and reranking AI models, and an agent builder. Elasticsearch simplifies building search, AI, and agentic applications by unifying structured and unstructured data, along with vectors into a single, low-latency engine that delivers precise relevance. Built for production, Elasticsearch scales with near real-time performance and cost efficiency, powering high-throughput ingestion and supporting petabyte-scale datasets.

Table of Contents

•Elastic Observability. Our agentic observability platform brings logs, metrics, and traces into a unified datastore so SRE/Operations teams and AI agents can investigate, correlate, and resolve issues across applications, networks, and infrastructure. Observability includes log analytics, to search, analyze, and visualize petabytes of structured and unstructured logs; infrastructure monitoring, for visibility across cloud, on-premises, Kubernetes, serverless, and hosts; Application Performance Monitoring (“APM”), support for native production-grade OpenTelemetry without proprietary agents and broad language support to pinpoint code issues and debug faster; digital experience monitoring, to improve user experience with synthetic testing and real user monitoring (“RUM”); Streams, which parse and structure raw telemetry data without rebuilding pipelines and Significant Events, which surface critical errors, anomalies, and system changes, cutting time to root cause and giving AI agents the grounded context they need to triage alerts, run investigations, and propose remediations; and LLM observability, to track latency, errors, prompts, responses, usage, and costs across major LLM services and agent frameworks.

•Elastic Security. Elastic Security is an agentic security operations platform where agents handle the full lifecycle from data ingestion through response, and human analysts handle judgment, verification, and approval. Built on the Elasticsearch data and AI platform, it provides unified protection to prevent, detect, and respond to threats. The solution combines Security Information and Event Management (“SIEM”), Extended Detection and Response (“XDR”), endpoint security with third-party integrations and first-party protections, cloud security, and native Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (“SOAR”) capabilities in a single platform, with integrations across network, host, user, cloud, and endpoint data sources. It enables investigations, incident management, shareable analytics, and workflow automation with AI-driven detection, investigation, and response.

Our Deployment Options

Our platform is available either as self-managed software or a cloud service. With Elastic Self-Managed, users can also download and manage their own deployments of our platform and our solutions. To help with more complex deployment scenarios, we offer paid proprietary products to deliver centralized provisioning, management, and monitoring across multiple deployments. Elastic Cloud, our family of cloud-based offerings (including both Elastic Cloud Hosted and Elastic Cloud Serverless) is hosted on major public cloud providers. We also partner with other cloud providers that offer our software to users on their cloud platform as a hosted offering.

Strengths of our Products

The strengths of our products include the following:

•Speed. Our platform can find matches for search criteria in milliseconds within even the largest structured and unstructured datasets. Its schemaless structure and inverted indices enable real-time search of high volumes of structured, unstructured, and time series data.

•Scale. Our platform is a distributed system and can scale. It has the ability to subdivide search indices into multiple pieces called shards, which enables data volume to be scaled horizontally and operations to be distributed across hundreds of systems or more. A developer running hundreds of nodes has the same user experience as a developer running a single node on a laptop.

•Relevance. Our platform uses multiple analytical techniques, including both traditional and AI-powered relevance techniques, to determine the similarity between stored data and queries, generating highly relevant results reflecting a deep understanding of text and context. Its sophisticated yet developer-friendly query language permits advanced search and analytics. Additionally, the speed of our platform permits query iteration, further enhancing the relevance of search results.

•Ease of Use. Our platform is engineered to take a user from data to dashboard or inquiry to insight in minutes. It offers an easy getting-started experience, featuring streamlined download and deployment, sensible defaults, a simple and intuitive query language, and no need to define a schema up front. Administrative tasks such as securing the platform are intuitive and integrated into the user experience, as are investigative tasks such as data visualization.

•Flexibility. Our platform is able to ingest, filter, store, search, and analyze data in any form, whether structured or unstructured. These capabilities enable our platform to generate insights from a wide variety of data sources for a broad range of use cases. The flexibility of our platform also enables users to begin using our products along with their existing systems, which lowers barriers to adoption.

Table of Contents

•Extensibility. Our platform can be used by developers as a foundation for addressing a wide variety of use cases. Our open approach to building our platform empowers developers to innovate and utilize it to fit their specific needs. Additionally, our developer community actively engages with us to improve and expand our platform.

Our Growth Strategies

We pursue the following growth strategies:

•Extend our product leadership through continued investment in our technology. We continue to invest in our platform, solutions, and services to extend into new use cases, industries, geographies, and customers. We regularly deliver new and enhanced capabilities to our customers, such as the enhanced AI technology integrated in our platform, through regular releases, to which everyone has access based on our subscription model. We continue to offer comprehensive AI capabilities in several key areas, providing organizations with tools and infrastructure to leverage AI, including vector search capabilities, inference and retrieval application programming interfaces (“APIs”), embedding and relevance models, agentic workflows, data ingestion, data management, and domain-specific applications. We view our AI capabilities as a major competitive differentiator for our products and intend to continue to invest in additional features and functionality related to AI. We also offer Elastic Cloud Serverless, a fully-managed, stateless architecture that auto-scales with customer usage. We manage the underlying deployment and customers benefit from automatic upgrades. Our technology investments include foundational platform capabilities as well as solution enhancements for our target use cases.

•Increase product adoption by improving ease of use and growing our user community. With our engineering efforts focused on the user experience, we continue to develop software that makes our products easier to use and adopt for both developers and non-developers. We plan to continue to engage with developers globally to grow our user community through a wide range of touch points such as community meetups, global community groups, hackathons, our global events, our user conferences, which we call ElasticON, and engagement on our website, user forums, and code repositories.

•Expand our customer base by acquiring new customers. We engage our community and our partners to drive awareness and invest in our sales and marketing team to grow our customer base. We offer varied deployment options, including Elastic Self-Managed, Elastic Cloud Hosted, and Elastic Cloud Serverless, to cater to a wide range of customer use cases. Our sales and marketing team conducts campaigns to drive further awareness and adoption within the user community. As a result, many of our sales prospects, including those in executive-level conversations, are already familiar with our technology before entering into a commercial relationship with us. Additionally, we leverage our network of partners to drive awareness and expand our sales and marketing reach to target new customers.

•Expand within our existing customer base through new use cases and larger deployments. We continue to invest in helping users and customers be successful with our products. We view initial success with our products as a path to drive expansion to new use cases and projects and larger deployments within organizations. We often enter an organization through a single use case or solution. Because of the rapid success with our products, knowledge of Elastic often spreads within an organization to new teams of developers, architects, IT operations personnel, security personnel, and senior executives, leading to more use cases for our products and solutions, and larger deployments at higher commitment levels.

•Expand our penetration in enterprise and commercial customer accounts. Using a sales-led motion, we continue to target strategic enterprise and high-propensity commercial customers with our sales teams. We meet our customers where they are, selling Elastic Self-Managed, Elastic Cloud Hosted, and Elastic Cloud Serverless deployments, focusing on high-value existing and new customers.

•Expand our strategic and regional partnerships. We continue to pursue partnerships to further the development of our platform and our customer reach. Our partners assist us in driving awareness of Elastic and our products, using our platform to address customer requirements, and extending our reach in geographic areas and verticals where we do not have a formal sales presence.

•Selectively pursue strategic acquisitions. We intend to continue to pursue acquisitions selectively. Since inception, we have selectively pursued strategic acquisitions to drive product and market expansion. The focus of our most recent acquisitions has been to enhance the technology underlying our Security and Observability offerings.

Table of Contents

Customers

Organizations of all sizes, across many industries, including enterprises, educational institutions and government entities, purchase our products for a variety of use cases. As of April 30, 2026, we had approximately 24,000 customers compared to approximately 21,500 and approximately 21,000 customers as of April 30, 2025 and 2024, respectively. We focus on higher-value customers as exemplified by accounts spending more than $100,000 and $1.0 million annually. As of April 30, 2026, we had more than 1,720 customers spending more than $100,000 annually, and more than 240 customers spending more than $1.0 million annually. One customer, a channel partner, accounted for 11% of total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2026 and 2024, and 12% of total revenue for the year ended April 30, 2025.

Seasonality

We have experienced quarterly fluctuations and seasonality in our sales and results of operations based on our entry into agreements with new and existing customers, customer usage patterns for our consumption-based arrangements, and the mix between annual and monthly contracts entered into in each reporting period. Seasonality in our sales cycle generally reflects a trend toward the highest sales in our fourth fiscal quarter and lowest sales in our first fiscal quarter. We believe this seasonality might become more pronounced as we continue to target large enterprise customers.

Research and Development

We intend to continue to invest in our research and development capabilities to extend our products. Research and development expense totaled $451.9 million, $365.8 million, and $342.0 million for the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024, respectively. We plan to continue to devote significant resources to research and development.

Our engineering organization focuses on enhancing existing products and developing new features that are easy to use and can be run in any environment, including in public or private clouds, in hybrid environments, or in multi-cloud environments. With a globally distributed engineering team, we are able to recruit, hire, and retain high-quality, experienced developers, technology leads, and product managers, and operate at a rapid pace to drive product releases, fix bugs, and create new product offerings.

Our software development process is based on iterative releases of our platform. We are organized in small functional teams with a high degree of autonomy and accountability, leveraging AI software development tools to accelerate our time-to-market. Our distributed and highly modular team structure and well-defined software development processes also allow us to successfully incorporate acquired technologies.

Sales and Marketing

We make it easy for users to begin using our products in order to drive rapid adoption. Users can either sign up for a free trial on Elastic Cloud or download our software directly from our website without any sales interaction, and immediately begin using the full set of features. Users can also sign up for Elastic Cloud through public cloud marketplaces.

With our business model, where users can download and use many of our features free of charge, our sales prospects are often already familiar with or using our platform. We conduct low-touch campaigns to keep users and customers engaged once they have begun using our software. This process includes providing high-quality content, documentation, webinars, videos, and blogs through our website. We also drive high-touch engagement with qualified prospects and customers to drive further awareness, adoption, and expansion of our products with paid subscriptions. Many of these customers start with limited initial spending on our products but can significantly increase their spending over time.

Our sales teams are organized primarily by geography and secondarily by customer segments. We rely on inside sales development representatives to qualify leads based on the likelihood they will result in a purchase. We pursue sales opportunities both through our direct sales force and with the assistance of our partners, including through cloud marketplaces. Our relationships within customer organizations often extend beyond the initial users of the technology and include technology and business decision-makers at various levels. We also engage with our customers on an ongoing basis through a customer success team to ensure customer satisfaction and expand their use of our technology.

Partners

We maintain partner relationships that help us market and deliver our products to our customers and complement our community. Our partner relationships include the following:

Table of Contents

•Cloud providers. We work with many of the major cloud providers to increase awareness of our products and make it easy to access our software. We partner with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to offer Elastic Cloud on AWS, GCP, and Azure, respectively, through direct purchase from us or their respective marketplaces. We also partner with other cloud providers to offer our free and paid proprietary features to users on their cloud platforms.

•Systems integrators, channel partners, and referral partners. We have a global network of systems integrators, channel partners, and referral partner relationships that help deliver our products to business and government customers around the world.

•OEM and MSP partners. Our OEM and MSP partners embed an Elastic subscription into the products or services they offer to their customers. OEM and MSP partners are able to include Elastic’s proprietary features in their product, receive ongoing support from Elastic for product development, and receive support for end customer issues related to Elastic.

•Technology partners. Our technology partners collaborate with Elastic to create a standardized solution for end users that includes technology from both Elastic and the partner. Technology partners represent a deeper collaboration than community contributions and are distinct from distribution-oriented relationships like OEM and MSP partners.

•AI ecosystem. Our AI ecosystem provides customers with a curated, comprehensive set of AI technologies and tools integrated with the Elasticsearch vector database, designed to speed time-to-market, ROI delivery, and innovation. The Elastic AI Ecosystem includes integrations with Anthropic's Claude, Cohere, Confluent, Dataiku, DataRobot, Galileo, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Mistral AI, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Protect AI, Red Hat, Vectorize.io, and Unstructured, along with all of the major hyperscalers, consisting of AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Services

We offer consulting and training to assist customers in accelerating their success with our software. Our consulting team consists of engineers and architects who bring hands-on experience and deep technical knowledge to a project. Our training offerings enable our users to gain the skills necessary to develop, deploy, and manage our software.

Customer Support

We endeavor to make it easy for users to download, install, deploy, and use our platform and our solutions. Our user community enables users to engage in self-help and collaboration.

However, in many situations, such as those involving complex enterprise IT environments, large deployments, and novel use cases, our users require our support. Accordingly, we include support as part of the subscriptions we sell for our products. Our global support organization consists of engineers who provide technical support services, including troubleshooting, technical audits, cluster tuning, and upgrade assistance. Our support team is globally distributed and provides coverage 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, across multiple languages.

We do not sell support independently and, as such, it is only available for customers who license one or more of our product offerings.

Our Technology

Our platform consists of our three solutions (Search & AI, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security) and software that supports our various deployment alternatives. Because our solutions are built on top of a common platform, innovations and new capabilities in our platform may benefit many of our solutions. Our customers can customize and extend our solutions to fit their needs by leveraging the power of our platform and our developer capabilities.

Technology Features of the Elasticsearch Platform

Key features of our platform include the following:

•Storage of any type of data. Our platform combines powerful parts of traditional search engines, such as an inverted index to power fast full-text search and a column store for analytics, with native support for a wide range of data types, including text, dates, numbers, geospatial data, date/numeric ranges, and IP addresses. With sensible defaults, and no upfront schema definition necessary, our platform makes it easy to start with simple storage solutions and fine-tune them as datasets grow.

Table of Contents

•Vector database. Elasticsearch is the most downloaded open source vector database, allowing users to create, store, and search vector embeddings at scale. By adding the ability to combine text and vector search for hybrid retrieval—and filtering, ranking, and reranking capabilities to deliver the most relevant results—we go beyond traditional vector databases. Elastic is the only platform with Better Binary Quantization to reduce the memory required without sacrificing accuracy.

•Agent Builder. Elastic Agent Builder is an AI conversational capability that lets you create AI agents that answer questions and take actions over any customer data using natural language. Agents combine LLM reasoning and context engineering with built-in and custom tools that query customer data, so responses are grounded in customer context.

•Machine learning, AI, and alerting. Machine learning capabilities such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and categorization are a tightly integrated part of our platform so as to automatically model the behavior of data, such as trends and periodicity, in real time, to identify issues faster, streamline root cause analysis, and reduce false positives. Without these capabilities, it can be difficult to identify issues such as infrastructure problems or intruders in real time across complex, high-volume, fast-moving datasets. In the last few years, we have also added native support for vector search and model management for advanced machine learning models.

•Powerful query languages. The Elasticsearch query domain specific language is a flexible, expressive search language that exposes a rich set of query capabilities across any kind of data. From simple Boolean operators to custom relevance functions, users can articulate exactly what they are looking for and bring their own definition of relevance. The query language also includes a composable aggregation framework that enables users to summarize, disaggregate, and analyze structured or semi-structured datasets across multiple dimensions. Examples of these capabilities, all with a single search, include tracking the top ten users by expenditure level, looking at data week over week, analyzing data across geographies, and drilling down into details with specific filters.

•Developer centricity. Elasticsearch has consistent, well-documented APIs that work the same way on one node during initial development as on a hundred nodes in production. Elasticsearch also ships with a number of language clients that provide a natural way to integrate with a variety of popular programming frameworks, reducing the learning curve, and leading to a shorter time to realizing value.

•High speed. Everything stored in Elasticsearch is indexed by default, so users do not need to decide in advance what queries they will want to run. Our architecture optimizes throughput, time-to-data availability, and query latency. Elasticsearch can index millions of events per second, and newly added data can be available for search nearly instantly.

•High scale and availability. Elasticsearch is designed to scale horizontally and be resilient to node or hardware failures. As nodes join a cluster, data is automatically rebalanced and queries and indexing are spread across the new nodes seamlessly. This makes it easy to add hardware to increase indexing throughput or improve query throughput. Elasticsearch also detects node failures and hardware or network issues, and automatically protects user data by eliminating the failing or inaccessible nodes and creating new replicas of the data.

•Security. Security features give administrators the rights to grant specific levels of access to their various types of users, such as IT, operations, and application teams. Elasticsearch serves as the central authentication hub for our entire platform. Security features include encrypted communications and encryption-at-rest; role-based access control; single sign-on and authentication; field-level, attribute-level, and document-level security; and audit logging.

Kibana, our platform’s user interface, allows users to manage our platform and to visualize data. Customers can also use Agent Builder’s chat interface to communicate in real time with their data. Additionally, the interfaces for many of our solutions (such as Elastic Observability and Elastic Security) are built into this interface. Key features of our user interface include the following:

•Exploration and visualization of stored data. Our platform’s user interface provides interactive data views, visualizations, and dashboards powered by structured filtering and unstructured search to enable users to get to answers more quickly. Diverse user needs are supported by a variety of data visualization types, such as simple line and bar charts, purpose-built geospatial and time series visualizations, tree diagrams, network diagrams, heatmaps, scatter plots, and histograms.

•Incorporation of advanced analytics and machine learning from Elasticsearch. Our platform’s user interface query, filtering, and data summarization capabilities reflect Elasticsearch’s powerful query domain-specific language and aggregation framework while making it interactive.

Table of Contents

•Management of the Elasticsearch Platform. Our user interface illustrates the health of our platform’s various components and provides timely alerts to notify administrators of any problems. Its central management user interfaces make it easier to operate our platform at scale.

•Home for solutions. Our user interface is where our users and customers access our three solutions: Search & AI, Elastic Observability, and Elastic Security. It provides core services, like security, alerting, and data visualization components, which make it easy for users to discover all of the capabilities our platform and solutions provide.

•Application framework. Our user interface is designed to be extensible. Users interested in a highly specialized visualization type not distributed by default can customize experiences and make these customizations available to the community. Dozens of customizations have been shared by the community via Elastic documentation and code sharing platforms such as GitHub.

Technology Features of our Solutions

Our solutions are designed to minimize time-to-value and deployment costs of using our platform for common use cases. The functionality of our solutions often includes specialized data collection, through standardized APIs or custom agents, and custom user interfaces for specific data analytics, visualizations, workflows, and actions.

Search & AI gives users the tools to improve customer search experiences quickly and scale them seamlessly.

•Search applications. Customers can bring the focused power of our platform to their company website, ecommerce site, workplace search, or applications with sophisticated retrieval algorithms and the ability to integrate with LLMs. Elastic delivers seamless scalability, tunable relevance controls, thorough documentation, well-maintained clients, a refined set of APIs, intuitive dashboards, and robust analytics to build a leading search experience. Customers can build rich applications directly on top of Elasticsearch, or they can use our Application Search framework to rapidly build and customize search applications, including internal workplace search-based experiences.

•Context engineering. Customers use Elasticsearch to build context engines that ground LLMs and AI agents in company-specific information for trustworthy, precise, and cost-efficient outcomes. Elastic unifies enterprise data—structured, unstructured, and vectors—to give LLMs and AI agents the right information at the right time, whether they are powering retrieval-augmented generation pipelines or autonomous workflows. Through Jina AI's multi-modal, multi-lingual embedding models, semantic reranking, and hybrid search across BM25, kNN, and dense vector retrieval, Elastic turns logs, documents, telemetry, and transactions into highly relevant context that AI agents and LLMs can act on with fewer tokens consumed.

Elastic Observability monitors the IT ecosystem of applications, services, and infrastructure to deliver actionable insights into performance and availability.

•Log analytics. Index, search, and analyze structured and unstructured logs at large scale to monitor the health and performance of an organization’s services, infrastructure, and applications. Users can analyze and visualize information extracted from logs to understand system behavior and trends to optimize performance and preemptively address potential issues. By querying logs in ad hoc ways, users can triage, troubleshoot, and resolve performance issues.

•Infrastructure monitoring. With 500+ out-of-the-box integrations and automatic import, users gain visibility across cloud, Kubernetes, serverless, on-premises, and hosts. Intuitive visualizations and quick analysis supported by out-of-the-box machine learning and preconfigured dashboards allow users to troubleshoot faster, as well as measure performance targets for services such as availability, latency, traffic, and errors using service level objectives.

•APM. OpenTelemetry-based APM delivers insights into application performance at the code level. Users can instrument apps and see the lifecycle of a transaction across services from front end to back end. This can give developers confidence in the code they ship, and can give operational teams visibility into code-level errors and performance bottlenecks to accelerate root cause analysis and resolution during an investigation.

•Digital experience monitoring. Customers and users can identify problem areas and improve the overall experiences of their end users as they navigate their digital assets. With synthetic monitoring, customers can track and monitor the availability of the hosts, websites, services, and application endpoints that support business operations. Through proactive monitoring with synthetic monitoring and RUM, customers can detect troublesome components before they are reported by end users.

Table of Contents

•AIOps. Always-on machine learning analysis instantly surfaces anomalies, patterns, correlations, and root causes. AI Assistant and advanced machine learning enable interactive natural language chat experience that integrates with enterprise knowledge bases to quickly resolve issues.

•LLM observability. LLM observability tracks costs, latency, errors, and dependencies of LLMs while ensuring safety and reliability.

Elastic Security delivers unified protection to prevent, detect, and respond to a variety of threats across the IT ecosystem.

•SIEM. Elastic delivers fast, scalable detection and investigation across cloud, network, endpoint, user, and third-party data. Security data is normalized using Elastic Common Schema and enriched to provide relevant context for analysis. Analysts can search across all data, pivot during investigations, and review activity using timeline views and built-in case tracking. AI-assisted features help identify related alerts and prioritize what matters most. The platform is open and accessible, giving teams full control over their data and the flexibility to adapt detections and workflows. Built-in SOAR capabilities streamline response by automating alert forwarding, case creation, and workflow integrations with external tools, thus reducing manual effort without switching platforms.

•XDR. Elastic delivers XDR capabilities by correlating data across endpoints, cloud, network, and user activity, all within the SIEM. Prebuilt rules, machine learning jobs, and AI-driven analytics help detect multi-stage attacks that cross domains. By analyzing native and third-party telemetry together in one interface, Elastic reduces investigation time and eliminates context switching.

•Endpoint security. Elastic Security includes endpoint detection and response capabilities integrated directly into the SIEM. These capabilities detect and block ransomware, fileless attacks, and hands-on-keyboard activity, including on isolated hosts. Endpoint data, whether native or from third-party tools, is analyzed alongside other telemetry to provide context and trigger automated response actions across systems.

•Cloud security. Elastic provides cloud detection and response capabilities directly within the SIEM, giving security teams visibility into activity across multi-cloud environments. These capabilities combine cloud workload monitoring with posture and vulnerability context. Native telemetry from cloud providers and findings from third-party cloud security posture management tools can be ingested and analyzed together, helping teams connect misconfigurations to real-time threats. This unified view across accounts and providers reduces blind spots and speeds up response to risks in modern cloud environments.

•Workflows for security. Elastic Workflows brings native automation directly into Elastic Security, delivering SOAR capabilities without a separate tool. It combines scripted playbooks for defined tasks with AI agents that reason through complex investigations and execute response actions including isolating hosts, querying threat intelligence, and escalating incidents. Workflows for security connects to external systems including Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and PagerDuty, with representational state transfer (“REST”) API support for additional tools, to coordinate response across the security stack.

Community

Elastic has always been committed to an open development process with transparent and direct engagement with our community. Our team extends beyond our employee base and includes all of the users who download our software. Our users interact with us on our website forums and on X, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Quora, Facebook, and other platforms.

To build products that best meet our users’ needs, we focus on, and invest in, building a strong community. Each download of our platform is a new opportunity to educate our next contributor, hear about a new use case, explore the need for a new feature, or meet a future member of the team. Community is core to our identity, binding our products closely together with our users. Community gives us the ability to get their candid feedback, creating a direct line of communication between our users and the builders of our products across all of our features—including both free and paid capabilities—and enabling us to make our products simpler and better.

The Elastic community has a code of conduct that covers the behaviors of the Elastic community in any forum, mailing list, wiki, website, code repository, Slack channel, private correspondence, or public meeting. It is designed to ensure that the Elastic community is a space where members and users can freely and openly communicate, collaborate, and contribute both ideas and code. This Elastic community code of conduct also covers our community ground rules: be considerate, be patient, be respectful, be nice, communicate effectively, and ask for help when unsure.

Table of Contents

Competition

Our market is highly competitive, quickly evolving, fragmented, and subject to rapid changes in technology, shifting customer needs, and frequent introductions of new offerings. Our principal competitors include:

•For Search & AI: providers of traditional search offerings, such as Algolia, Apache Solr (open source offering), and Coveo; native vector databases, such as Pinecone, Qdrant, and Weaviate; database platforms with integrated vector search, such as MongoDB Atlas; and search tools, such as Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) and Microsoft Azure AI Search.

•For Elastic Observability: software vendors with specific observability solutions, such as AppDynamics and Splunk (each owned by Cisco Systems), Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic.

•For Elastic Security: security vendors, such as Azure Sentinel (owned by Microsoft), CrowdStrike, Google SecOps, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk (owned by Cisco Systems).

•Certain cloud hosting providers and MSPs, including AWS, which offer products or services based on a forked version of our platform. These offerings are not supported by Elastic and come without any of Elastic’s proprietary features, whether free or paid.

The principal competitive factors for companies in our industry are:

•product capabilities, including speed, scale, and relevance, with which to power search AI experiences;

•an extensible product “stack” that enables developers to build a wide variety of solutions;

•powerful and flexible technology that can manage a broad variety and large volume of data;

•ease of deployment and ease of use;

•ability to address a variety of evolving customer needs and use cases;

•strength and execution of sales and marketing strategies;

•flexible deployment model across public or private clouds, hybrid environments, or multi-cloud environments;

•productized solutions engineered to be rapidly adopted to address specific applications;

•mindshare with developers and IT and security executives;

•adoption of products by many types of users and decision makers (including developers, architects, DevOps personnel, IT professionals, security analysts, and departmental and organizational leaders);

•enterprise-grade technology that is secure and reliable;

•size of customer base and level of user adoption;

•quality of training, consulting, and customer support;

•brand awareness and reputation; and

•low total cost of ownership.

We believe that we compare favorably to our competitors on the basis of the factors listed above. However, compared to us, many of our competitors have substantially greater financial, technical and other resources, greater brand recognition, larger sales forces and marketing budgets, broader distribution networks and presence, more established relationships with current or potential customers and partners, more diverse product and services offerings, and larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios. Our competitors may be able to leverage these resources to gain business in a manner that discourages customers from purchasing our offerings.

We expect that our industry will continue to attract new companies, including smaller emerging companies, which could introduce new offerings. We may also expand into new markets and encounter additional competitors in such markets.

While our products and solutions have various competitors across different use cases, such as search applications and workplace search, logging, metrics, APM, and business and security analytics, we believe that few competitors currently have the capabilities to address our entire range of use cases. We believe our industry requires constant change and innovation, and we plan to continue to evolve search as a foundational technology to solve the problems of today and new emerging problems of the future.

Table of Contents

Intellectual Property

We rely on a combination of patents, patent applications, registered and unregistered trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, and other contractual measures to safeguard our core technology and other intellectual property assets. In addition, we maintain a policy requiring our employees, contractors, and consultants to enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements. As of April 30, 2026, we had a number of active patents, issued in both the United States and outside of the United States, with expirations ranging from 2030 to 2044. In addition, as of April 30, 2026, we had numerous U.S. and international trademark registrations.

The laws, procedures and restrictions on which we rely may provide only limited protection, and any of our intellectual property rights may be challenged, invalidated, circumvented, infringed, or misappropriated. In addition, the laws of certain countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States, the Netherlands, or other jurisdictions and, therefore, we may be unable to protect our proprietary technology in certain jurisdictions.

In addition, our technology incorporates software components licensed to the general public under open source software licenses such as the Apache Software License Version 2.0 (“Apache 2.0”) and other permissive licenses. We obtain many components from software developed and released by contributors for independent open source components of our technology. Open source licenses grant licensees broad permissions to use, copy, modify, and redistribute our platform. As a result, open source development and licensing practices can limit the value of our software copyright assets.

For additional information about risks relating to our intellectual property, see the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to our Business and Industry” in Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Human Capital Management

We believe that our employees (whom we call “Elasticians”) and our culture are vital to Elastic’s long-term success. We support both with human capital management efforts focused on:

•Attracting, engaging, and retaining a talented employee base that values different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds

•Facilitating strong employee engagement

•Promoting continuous employee learning and development

•Providing a comprehensive total rewards package that seeks to offer fair and consistent pay practices with an emphasis on employee well-being

Our management regularly updates our board of directors and its committees on human capital trends and employee-focused activities and initiatives.

As of April 30, 2026, we had a total of 4,019 employees in over 40 countries globally. None of our U.S. employees are represented by a labor union. In certain countries, we have works councils or follow statutory requirements for employee representation through industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.

Distributed Workforce

Elastic originated as a distributed company and continues to be distributed by design. We have built our processes, systems, and teams so that employees can generally perform their jobs without needing to be physically present at the same location as their colleagues. Just as distributed systems are more resilient, we believe that a distributed workforce helps build a strong company that can scale and adapt as new challenges arise. Our distributed model also expands our reach, broadening our ability to attract talent across regions.

Culture and Values

At the core of our culture is our “Source Code”—a shared set of ideas that guide our approach to business with an emphasis on delivering value for our customers while providing flexibility and balance for our employees, empowering them to be their whole, creative selves.

We endeavor to be an employer of choice and strive to sustain a sense of inclusion and belonging among all employees with programs designed to foster community and an appreciation for the unique experiences and perspectives represented across Elasticians globally. We are committed to ensuring that our employees have a voice and the opportunity to share their ideas and insights through regular employee experience surveys reviewed across multiple organizational levels.

Table of Contents

We support the continuous learning and development of all Elasticians through programs that develop skills for individual contributors, leaders of others, and leaders of the business. We deliver learning and development both through on-demand virtual learning and programs for specific teams or groups of emerging leaders. To promote and reinforce our high standards of ethics and integrity throughout the entire company, we require all employees to acknowledge their compliance with our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and complete mandatory training on this code, and on whistleblowing, anti-harassment, discrimination, anti-retaliation, and other key policies and standards.

Total Rewards

We aim to provide all our employees with a total rewards package that is market-competitive, emphasizing global consistency and local relevance. We are committed to fair pay without regard to gender, race, or ethnicity. We partner with an external firm to conduct pay equity analysis on a regular basis using established job groupings and control factors to promote appropriate comparisons. We provide benefit programs designed to enable employees to meet their well-being goals, from starting a family to being at their physical and emotional best.

Through our Elastic Cares program, our employees can support the charitable organizations that matter most to them on a local and global level. This program encompasses donation matching, our nonprofit organization program which provides our technology for free to certain nonprofit organizations, and our volunteer time-off initiative.

Government Regulations

Our worldwide business activities are subject to various laws, rules, and regulations of the United States as well as of foreign governments. Our compliance with existing or future governmental regulations, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to global trade, business acquisitions, consumer and data protection, and taxes, could have material impacts on our business. See “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of these potential impacts.

Corporate Information

We are a distributed company, which means our workforce is distributed globally. Accordingly, we do not have a principal executive office. We are registered with the trade register of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under number 54655870. Our registered office is at Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Our ordinary shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) under the trading symbol “ESTC.”

Available Information

Our website address is www.elastic.co. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website does not constitute part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and references to our website address in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are inactive textual references only.

We announce material information to the public about us, our products and services, and other matters through a variety of means, including filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), press releases, public conference calls, our website (www.elastic.co), the investor relations section of our website (https://ir.elastic.co), our blog (www.elastic.co/blog), and/or social media, including our account on X (https://x.com/elastic), our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/elastic.co), and/or LinkedIn account (www.linkedin.com/company/elastic-co) to achieve broad, non-exclusionary distribution of information to the public. We encourage investors and others to review the information we make public in these locations, as such information could be deemed to be material information. This list may be updated from time to time.

We make available, free of charge through our website, our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and all amendments to these reports as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.

Item 1A. Risk Factors

A description of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business, industry, and ownership of our ordinary shares is set forth below. The risks and uncertainties described below are not the only ones we face. Additional risks and uncertainties that we are unaware of, or that we currently believe are not material, may also become important factors that could adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results, and prospects.

Table of Contents

Risks Related to our Business and Industry

Our business and operations have experienced significant growth, and if we do not appropriately manage our future growth or are unable to improve our systems and processes, our business, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects may be adversely affected.

We have experienced significant growth and increased demand for our offerings. The growth and expansion of our business and offerings place a significant strain on our management, operational, and financial resources. In addition, as customers adopt our technology for an increasing number of use cases, we have had to support more complex commercial relationships. We may not be able to leverage, develop, and retain qualified employees effectively enough to realize our growth plans. Any failure by us to continue to improve our IT and financial infrastructure, our operating and administrative systems, our relationships with our partners and other third parties, and our ability to manage headcount and processes in an efficient manner could result in increased costs, negatively affect our customers’ satisfaction with our offerings, and harm our results of operations.

We have a history of losses and may not be able to achieve profitability on a consistent basis.

We incurred a net loss of $108.1 million for the year ended April 30, 2025 and have incurred losses in all but two fiscal years since our inception. As a result, we had an accumulated deficit of $732.0 million as of April 30, 2026. Although we had net income of $367.8 million and $61.7 million for the years ended April 30, 2026 and 2024, respectively, we would have incurred net losses in such years as well without the releases of valuation allowances against deferred tax assets and we may incur net losses in future years. Our operating expenses will continue to increase substantially in the foreseeable future as we continue to enhance our offerings, broaden our customer base and pursue larger transactions, expand our sales and marketing activities and other operations, hire additional employees, and continue to develop our technology. These efforts may prove more expensive than we currently expect, and we may not succeed in increasing our revenue sufficiently, or at all, to offset these higher expenses. Revenue growth may slow or revenue may decline because of slowing demand for our offerings, increasing competition, or other factors, including as a result of rising rates of inflation, economic downturns, and other macroeconomic events. You should not consider our revenue growth in prior periods as indicative of our future performance. Any failure by us to continue to increase our revenue and grow our business could prevent us from achieving profitability at all or on a consistent basis.

Unfavorable or uncertain conditions in our industry or the global economy or reductions in IT spending, including as a result of adverse macroeconomic conditions, international trade policies, or geopolitical conflicts, could limit our ability to grow our business and negatively affect our results of operations.

Our results of operations may vary based on the impact of changes in our industry or the global economy on us or our customers. Current, future, or sustained economic uncertainties or downturns, whether actual or perceived, could adversely affect our business and results of operations. Negative conditions in the general economy both in the United States and in international markets, including conditions resulting from changes in gross domestic product growth, financial and credit market fluctuations, international trade policies, changes in inflation, foreign exchange and interest rate environments, recessionary fears, supply chain constraints, energy costs, political instability and conflict, natural catastrophes, warfare, infectious diseases, and terrorist attacks, could cause a decrease in business investments by our customers and potential customers, including their spending on IT, and negatively affect the growth of our business. For example, inflation rates have continued to create economic volatility as governments adjust interest rates in an attempt to manage the inflationary environment, which may further lead to our customers reducing their technology expenditures and investment. Further, the evolving conflicts and geopolitical turmoil around the world could continue to have significant negative macroeconomic consequences, including on the businesses of our customers, which could negatively impact their spending on our offerings.

Heightened global economic uncertainty and changes in economic conditions, including in international trade relations, legislation and regulations (including those related to trade policies, and taxation), enforcement priorities, or economic and monetary policies, could result in heightened diplomatic tensions or political and civil unrest, among other potential impacts, may have an adverse effect on the global economy as a whole and on our business, or may require us, our customers, and other stakeholders to significantly modify current business practices. Any further disruptions or other adverse developments, or concerns or rumors about any such events or similar risks, in the financial services industry, both in the United States and in international markets, may lead to market-wide liquidity problems and may impact our or our customers’ liquidity and, as a result, negatively affect the level of customer spending on our offerings.

Table of Contents

As a result of the foregoing conditions, our revenue may be disproportionately affected by longer and more unpredictable sales cycles, delays or reductions in customer consumption or in general IT spending, and additional impacts of changing foreign exchange rates. Further, current and potential customers may choose to develop in-house software as an alternative to using our paid products. These factors could increase the amount of customer attrition we have experienced recently and further slow consumption and overall customer expenditure. Moreover, competitors may respond to market conditions by lowering prices. If the economic conditions of the general economy or markets in which we operate do not improve, or worsen from present levels, our business, results of operations, and financial condition could be adversely affected.

Our business, reputation, or financial results may be adversely affected by any failure by us to be successful in our AI initiatives, by significant competition we face in the AI landscape, and by uncertain market understanding and valuation of AI and machine learning technologies.

AI presents new risks and challenges that may affect our business. We are increasingly utilizing and building AI and machine learning (“ML”) capabilities into our business and have made, and expect to continue to make, continued investments to integrate AI and ML technology into our offerings, including increasing our technical operations and engineering in these applications. Rapid technological progress in the industry regarding new and emerging AI technologies, such as generative and agentic AI, may require additional investment in the development, integration, and maintenance of our product offerings, as well as the development of appropriate technical protections and safeguards to maintain a responsible and ethical AI framework. These requirements could increase our expenses as we continue to expand the breadth of use and applications of AI technologies, including generative and agentic AI, further into our product offerings, or to address changes to AI technologies, frameworks, or regulations. Furthermore, as we expand the number and variety of LLMs and other AI models integrated into or made available through our products and offerings, we face compounding uncertainties arising from the dynamic and evolving performance characteristics of such models. Such performance characteristics may include changes in model outputs, capabilities, accuracy, and behavior introduced by third-party model providers without advance notice to us. These changes may generate novel risks, including risks related to product reliability, customer trust, data integrity, third-party claims, and regulatory compliance, that we may not be able to anticipate, adequately assess, or promptly mitigate to avoid harmful effects on our business.

We may continue to incur substantial costs in our sales and marketing efforts to promote and sell our offerings based on AI technologies, including costs for branding, product promotion, and demand generation, as well as for technical training, training material generation, and investments in resources for our sales personnel and partners. Despite these investments, our product offerings may not be adopted by customers, and we may not achieve significant revenue directly related to our AI-related initiatives for several years, if at all.

AI presents risks, challenges, and unintended consequences that could affect our ability to continue to incorporate the use of AI successfully in our business and solutions in new ways. Given the complex nature of AI technology, we face an evolving regulatory landscape and significant competition from other companies. Competitors may incorporate AI and ML into their products, offerings, and solutions more quickly or more successfully than we do, which could impair our ability to compete effectively and adversely affect our financial results. Our ability to effectively implement and market our AI and ML solutions and features will depend, in part, on our ability to attract and retain employees with AI and ML expertise in competition with other enterprises for professionals with the skills and technical knowledge we will require. Data practices by us or others that result in controversy could also impair the acceptance of AI solutions, which could undermine confidence in the decisions, predictions, analysis, or other content produced by our AI-related initiatives. In addition, the rapid adoption of generative and agentic AI tools may change how software developers design, build and deploy applications, including through increased automation of coding, infrastructure configuration and application architecture. Because a portion of our strategy is focused on being a platform of choice for developers, changes in developer workflows, tooling or decision-making processes resulting from the adoption of AI-enabled development tools could affect how developers select databases or other data platforms. The demand for our products and services could be negatively affected if these evolving development patterns reduce developer engagement with, or preference for, our platform or favor alternative technologies or architectures.

While adoption of AI and ML is likely to continue and may accelerate, the long-term trajectory of this technological trend, as well as market acceptance, understanding and valuation of solutions and services that incorporate AI and ML technologies, is uncertain, and the perceived value of AI and ML technologies used and provided by our customers could be inaccurate. If AI and ML is not broadly adopted by enterprises to the extent we anticipate, or if new use cases do not arise, then our opportunity may be smaller than we expect. Such risks and challenges could slow or even halt the adoption of AI and ML and negatively affect our business.

Table of Contents

Ethical and regulatory issues relating to the use of AI and similar evolving technologies in our offerings may result in new or enhanced governmental or regulatory scrutiny, reputational harm, damage to our competitive position, and liability.

Social, ethical, security and regulatory issues relating to the use of new and evolving technologies such as AI and ML, including generative and agentic AI and AI models, in our offerings, internal operations or partnerships, may result in reputational harm and liability, and may cause us to incur additional research and development costs to resolve such issues. The use of generative and agentic AI, which are relatively new and emerging technologies in the early stages of commercial use, exposes us to additional risks, such as damage to our reputation, competitive position, and business, legal and regulatory risks and additional costs.

If our use of AI becomes controversial, we may experience loss of user trust, as well as brand or reputational harm, competitive injury, or legal liability. Potential government regulation related to AI and ML use and ethics may also increase the burden and cost of research and development in this area, and failure to properly remediate AI and ML usage or ethics issues may cause public confidence in AI and ML to be undermined. The rapid evolution of AI and ML will require the application of resources to develop, test and maintain any potential offerings or partnerships to help ensure that AI and ML are implemented ethically to minimize unintended, harmful impact. The use of AI technologies also could expose us to an increased risk of cybersecurity threats and incidents and claims or other adverse effects from infringements or violations of intellectual property or other regulated activity. Our use of such technologies could increase the risk of exposure of our or other parties’ proprietary confidential information, or other confidential or sensitive information, to unauthorized recipients, including inadvertent disclosure of confidential or sensitive information into publicly available third-party training sets. Such risks related to the use of AI, whether directly or indirectly, could harm our results of operations, competitive position and business.

AI is the subject of evolving review and scrutiny by various domestic and international governmental and regulatory agencies. Laws, rules, directives, and regulations governing the use of AI, such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (“EU AI Act”), are changing and evolving rapidly. The EU AI Act establishes, among other things, a risk-based governance framework for regulating AI systems operating in the EU. This framework categorizes AI systems by their intended purposes into levels of risk, with those deemed unacceptable or high risk being strictly regulated or prohibited and all remaining AI systems being classified as low risk. The EU AI Act prohibits certain uses of AI systems and places numerous obligations on providers and deployers of permitted AI systems, with heightened requirements based on AI systems that are general purpose, which we currently deploy, or considered high risk. In addition, a patchwork of state-level AI-related legislation continues to emerge in the United States. We may not be able to anticipate how to respond to these rapidly evolving frameworks, and we may need to expend resources to adjust our operations or offerings in certain jurisdictions if the legal frameworks are inconsistent across jurisdictions. Furthermore, because AI and ML technology itself is highly complex and rapidly developing, it is not possible to predict all of the legal, operational or technological risks that may arise relating to the use of AI and ML. These and other developments may require us to make significant changes to our use of AI and ML, including by limiting or restricting our use of AI and ML, which may require us to make significant changes to our policies and practices. The cost to comply with such laws or regulations could be significant and would increase our operating expenses, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The use of AI by our workforce may present risks to our business.

Our workforce is exposed to and uses AI technologies for certain tasks related to our business. While we have training and guidelines specifically directed at the use of AI tools in the workplace, use of these AI tools, whether authorized or unauthorized, poses risks relating to intellectual property, data protection, cybersecurity, and exposure of our proprietary confidential information to unauthorized recipients, which could result in the loss of intellectual property protection of such information, the misuse of our or third-party intellectual property, and the inability to claim intellectual property ownership of outputs from AI tools. Use of AI technology by our workforce even when used consistent with our guidelines, may result in allegations or claims against us related to violation of third-party intellectual property rights, unauthorized access to or use of proprietary information and failure to comply with open source software licenses. AI technology may also produce inaccurate responses that could lead to errors in our decision-making, solution development, operations or other business activities, which could have a negative impact on our business, operating results and financial condition. Our ability to mitigate these risks will depend on effective training, monitoring and enforcement of appropriate policies, guidelines and procedures governing the use of AI technology, and compliance by our workforce.

Table of Contents

Use of generative AI in our code development process, while offering various potential benefits, could also pose certain ownership and security risks with respect to our codebase, given the current legal uncertainties relating to ownership of AI- or ML-generated works and the potential for security flaws in output code. If any of our employees, contractors, vendors or service providers use any third-party AI-powered software in connection with our business or the services they provide to us, such use may lead to the inadvertent disclosure of our confidential information, including inadvertent disclosure of our confidential information into publicly available third-party training sets, which may impact our ability to realize the benefit of, or adequately maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property or confidential information, harming our competitive position and business.

If we experience a security incident, or if unauthorized access to or other unauthorized processing of confidential information, including personal data, otherwise occurs, our software may be perceived as not being secure, customers may reduce the use of or stop using our products, and we may incur significant liabilities.

In the normal course of our business, we receive, collect, manage, store, transmit and otherwise process large amounts of proprietary information and confidential data, including personal data and other sensitive information, relating to our operations, products, customers, and business partners. Any cybersecurity incident affecting our networks, systems or those on which we rely could result in our loss of confidential information, including personal data, disruption to our operations, significant remediation costs, lost revenue, increased insurance premiums, damage to our reputation, litigation, regulatory investigations, fines, or other liabilities. We face sophisticated and evolving cyber threats from individual hackers, criminal groups, and state-sponsored organizations, as well as risks that employees, contractors or other insiders, particularly those with connectivity to our systems, may introduce vulnerabilities into our environments, facilitate a cyber attack, or take action to misappropriate our intellectual property and proprietary information.

As a provider of security solutions, we provide security services to many entities that are frequently and intensively targeted by some cyber threat actions, such as U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, and non-U.S. governments. Our work protecting these entities increases the likelihood that we may be targeted by nation-state actors, including those from countries with a history of conducting cyber operations against such organizations. We have been and may continue to be specifically targeted by threat actors for attacks intended to circumvent our security capabilities as an entry point into customers’ endpoints, networks, or systems. Our industry continues to see a large volume of unauthorized scans of systems searching for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to exploit. Attempted cyber attacks of our systems can deploy such malicious techniques, among others, as phishing, ransomware, credential stuffing, distributed denial of service, network intrusions, malware, domain name system spoofing, exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities, and structural query language injection. While our security systems and controls have successfully protected us against, and mitigated the impacts of, many past attacks of this nature, we expect that we will experience similar incidents in the future.

If our security measures are compromised, we may face a loss of intellectual property protection, our data, or our customers’ data, and our reputation may be damaged, our business may suffer, and we could be subject to claims, demands, regulatory investigations, and other proceedings and indemnity obligations and otherwise incur significant liability. Even the perception of inadequate security or an inability to maintain security certifications, maintain a security program in line with industry standards, or comply with our customer or user agreements, contracts with third-party vendors or service providers, or other contracts may damage our reputation, cause a loss of confidence in our security solutions and negatively affect our ability to win new customers and retain existing customers. Further, we could be required to expend significant capital and other resources to address any security incident, and we may face difficulties or delays in identifying and responding to any cybersecurity incident. If our systems or networks or those on which we rely suffer severe damage, disruption, or shutdown and our business continuity plans do not effectively resolve the issues in a timely manner, we could experience delays in reporting our financial results, and we may lose revenue and profits as a result of our inability to timely produce, distribute, invoice and collect payments for our products and services.

Many of our customers may use our software for processing their confidential information, including business strategies, financial and operational data, personal information and other related data. As a result, unauthorized access to or use of our software or such data could result in the loss, compromise, corruption or destruction of our customers’ confidential information. Such access or use could also hinder our ability to obtain and maintain information security certifications that support customers’ adoption of our products and our retention of those customers. We expect to continue incurring significant costs in connection with our implementation of administrative, technical, and physical measures designed to protect the integrity of our customers’ data and prevent data loss, misappropriation, and other security incidents.

Table of Contents

We engage third-party vendors and service providers to store and otherwise process some of our and our customers’ data, including sensitive and personal information. There have been and may continue to be significant supply chain attacks generally, and our third-party vendors and service providers may be targeted or affected by such attacks and other efforts to exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Our ability to monitor our third-party vendors and service providers’ data security is limited. Threat actors may be able to circumvent those security measures and gain unauthorized access to, or cause misuse, disclosure, loss, destruction, or other unauthorized processing of, our and our customers’ data, including sensitive and personal information. Further, threat actors may attempt to deploy malicious code to users of the open source libraries leveraged by our products, which could negatively affect us and those users.

Techniques used to sabotage or obtain unauthorized access to systems or networks are constantly evolving and, in some instances, are not identified until launched against a target. We have seen, and expect to continue to see, the emergence and maturation of AI capabilities lead to new AI-specific attack vectors and vulnerabilities and more sophisticated methods of attack enhanced or facilitated by AI, including fraud that relies upon “deep fake” impersonation technology, automated vulnerability exploitation, inadvertent data exposure, AI supply-chain attacks, or other forms of automation that otherwise scale or accelerate the effectiveness of cybersecurity attacks. AI and ML also make it cheaper for attackers to create malware, phishing, code reviews, or other tools at significantly higher volumes, and much more rapidly deploy those tools than previously. AI and ML may change the way our industry identifies and responds to cybersecurity threats. The use of AI also has resulted in, and may in the future result in, security breaches or other security incidents that implicate the personal data of users of AI-powered applications as well as access to Elastic technology. We and our third-party vendors, open source and open weight dependency providers, and service providers may be unable to anticipate these techniques, react to them in a timely manner, or implement adequate preventative measures. The use of agentic AI is changing the ways that we secure and defend our platform and operations, as both threat actors and security teams are using AI to industrialize their approaches to attacks. Traditional perimeter controls and static security rules are no longer the most effective security mechanisms. We may not succeed in reinforcing our defensive capabilities to attempt to address this threat, as the applicable technology continues to be enhanced and deployed.

Because of the complexity and interconnectedness of our systems and networks and those on which we rely, the process of upgrading or patching our protective measures could itself create a risk of cybersecurity intrusions or system disruptions, including for customers who rely upon, or have exposure to, such systems and networks.

Limitations of liability provisions in our customer and user agreements, contracts with third-party vendors and service providers or other contracts may not be enforceable or adequate to protect us from any liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim relating to a security incident. We are subject to risks that our existing insurance coverage may not continue to be available on acceptable terms or available in sufficient amounts to cover claims related to a cybersecurity incident, or that the insurer may deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could adversely affect our business.

Our revenue growth rate may decline or even become negative if we are unable to increase sales of our subscriptions to new customers, sell additional subscriptions to our existing customers or renew current subscriptions, or expand the value of our existing customers’ subscriptions.

We offer certain features of our products with no payment required. Customers purchase subscriptions to gain access to additional functionality and support. We may not succeed in selling our subscriptions to new and existing customers, including to large enterprises, or in expanding the deployment of our offerings with existing customers by selling paid subscriptions to our existing users and expanding the value and number of existing customers’ subscriptions. Our ability to sell new subscriptions depends on a number of factors, including the prices of our offerings, the prices of products offered by our competitors, and the budgets of our customers. We also must displace the products of incumbent competitors. In addition, a significant aspect of our sales and marketing focus is to expand deployments within existing customers. The rate at which our existing customers purchase additional subscriptions and expand the value of existing subscriptions depends upon customers’ level of satisfaction with our offerings, the nature and size of the deployments, the desire to address additional use cases, the perceived need for additional features, and general economic conditions. If our existing customers do not purchase additional subscriptions or expand the value of their subscriptions, our Net Expansion Rate may decline. We rely in large part on our customers to identify new use cases for our products in order to expand such deployments and grow our business. Furthermore, our customers may choose not to renew their subscriptions with us or may choose to renew for shorter subscription terms or on terms less advantageous to us for a number of factors, including their budgets, their satisfaction with our products and customer support, our products’ ability to integrate with new and changing technologies, frequency and severity of product outages, our product uptime or latency, and the pricing of our products or competing products. Our business could be materially and adversely affected if our customers do not recognize the potential of our offerings, or if our efforts to sell subscriptions to new customers, to renew subscriptions with existing customers, and to expand deployments with existing customers are not successful.

Table of Contents

We may not be able to expand adoption of or realize expected return on investments in our cloud-based offerings.

We believe that we must offer cloud-based products to address the market segment that prefers a cloud-based solution, and that our future success will depend significantly on the growth in adoption of Elastic Cloud, our family of cloud-based offerings. For the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024, Elastic Cloud contributed 48%, 46%, and 43% of our total revenue, respectively. As the use of cloud-based computing solutions is rapidly evolving, it is difficult to predict the potential growth, if any, of general market adoption, customer adoption, and retention rates of our cloud-based offerings. We have incurred and will continue to incur substantial costs to develop, sell and support our Elastic Cloud offerings. We have entered into non-cancelable multi-year cloud hosting capacity commitments with some third-party cloud providers, which require us to pay for such capacity irrespective of actual usage. Further, as our cloud offerings make up an increasing percentage of our total revenue, we expect to see increased associated cloud-related costs, such as hosting and infrastructure costs, which may adversely impact our gross margins. Demand for cloud-based offerings could decrease for reasons within or outside of our control, including, among other factors, lack of customer acceptance, technological and security challenges with bringing cloud offerings to market and maintaining those offerings, information security, data protection, or privacy incidents, our inability to properly manage and support our cloud-based offerings, competing technologies and products, weakening economic conditions, and decreases in corporate spending. If we are not able to develop, market, or deliver cloud-based offerings that satisfy customer requirements technically or commercially, if our investments in cloud-based offerings do not yield the expected return, or if we are unable to decrease the cost of providing our cloud-based offerings, our business, competitive position, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

Our operating results are likely to fluctuate from quarter to quarter, and our financial results in any one quarter should not be relied upon as indicative of future performance.

Our results of operations, including our revenue, cost of revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, cash flows and deferred revenue, have fluctuated from quarter to quarter in the past and may continue to vary significantly in the future so that period-to-period comparisons of our results of operations may not be meaningful. These variations may be further impacted as more of our customers adopt consumption-based arrangements or as customers already on consumption-based arrangements adjust their usage in response to the current macroeconomic environment. These variations may also be impacted by internal reorganizations, including reassignment of personnel to new roles or to new sales territories. Accordingly, our financial results in any one quarter should not be unduly relied upon as indicative of future performance. Our quarterly financial results may fluctuate as a result of a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control, may be difficult to predict, and may or may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business. Factors that may cause fluctuations in our quarterly financial results include the risks and uncertainties described in this “Risk Factors” section and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Fluctuations in our results could cause us to fail to meet the expectations of investors or securities analysts, which could cause the trading price of our ordinary shares to fall substantially and result in costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits against us.

Seasonality in our sales cycle causes fluctuations in our results of operations.

Historically, we have experienced quarterly fluctuations and seasonality in our sales and results of operations based on the timing of our entry into agreements with new and existing customers, customer usage patterns for our consumption-based arrangements, and the mix between annual and monthly contracts entered into each reporting period. Trends in our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows are impacted by seasonality in our sales cycle, which generally reflects a trend toward the highest sales in our fourth fiscal quarter and the lowest sales in our first fiscal quarter. We expect that this seasonality will continue to affect our results of operations in the future, and might become more pronounced as we continue to target larger enterprise customers.

Our consumption-based arrangements for our Elastic Cloud offerings make it difficult to predict accurately the long-term rate of customer adoption or renewal, or the impact those arrangements will have on our near-term or long-term revenue or operating results.

Because we recognize revenue under a consumption-based arrangement based on actual customer consumption, we do not have the same ability to predict the timing of revenue recognition as we do under subscription arrangements in which revenue is recognized on a predetermined schedule over the subscription term. Moreover, customers may consume our products at a different pace than we expect. For example, we have experienced and, if adverse economic conditions persist, may continue to experience slowing consumption as customers look to optimize their usage. Additionally, we have seen and may continue to see newer customers increase their consumption of our solutions at a slower pace than our more tenured customers. For these reasons, our revenue in future periods may be less predictable or more variable than in past periods, and our actual results may differ materially from our forecasts.

Table of Contents

If we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, especially among developers and executives with budgetary control, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our business and operating results may be adversely affected.

We believe that developing and maintaining widespread awareness of our brand, especially with developers and executives with budgetary control within their organizations, is critical to achieving widespread acceptance of our software and attracting new users and customers. We also believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. Successfully maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing and branding efforts, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust, our ability to continue to develop new functionality and use cases, and our ability to successfully differentiate our products and platform capability from competitive products. Brand promotion activities may not generate user or customer awareness or increase revenue. Even if those activities do increase revenue, any such increase may not offset the expenses we incur in building our brand. For instance, our continued focus and investment in our ElasticON user conferences and similar investments in our brand, user engagement, and customer engagement may not generate the desired customer awareness or a sufficient financial return. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, we may fail to attract or retain users and customers necessary to achieve the widespread brand awareness that is critical for broad customer adoption of our products, which would adversely affect our business and results of operations.

We may not be able to compete successfully against current and future competitors.

The market for our products is highly competitive, quickly evolving, fragmented, and subject to rapid changes in technology, shifting customer needs, and frequent introductions of new offerings. We believe that our ability to compete depends upon many factors, some of which are beyond our control.

Some of our current and potential competitors have substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources, greater brand recognition, larger sales forces and marketing budgets, broader distribution networks and presence, more established relationships with current or potential customers and partners, more diverse product and services offerings, and larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios. Our competitors may be able to leverage these resources to gain business in a manner that discourages customers from purchasing our offerings. These factors may allow our competitors to respond more quickly than we can to new or emerging technologies and changes in customer preferences. Compared to us, these competitors may engage in more extensive research and development efforts, undertake more far-reaching and successful sales and marketing campaigns, have more experienced sales professionals, execute more successfully on their go-to-market strategy and have greater access to more markets and decision makers, and adopt more aggressive pricing policies, which may allow them to build larger customer bases than we have. Claims made about our products by current and future competitors, even if misleading, may also negatively impact customer perceptions about us. Start-up companies that innovate and large competitors that are making significant investments in research and development may develop offerings that compete with or achieve greater market acceptance than our offerings, which could attract customers away from our offerings and reduce our market share. As market segments become increasingly crowded and competition intensifies, we could potentially face increasing costs of goods and services sold. If we are unable to anticipate or react effectively to these competitive challenges, our competitive position would weaken, which could adversely affect our business and results of operations.

Conditions in our market are changing rapidly and significantly as a result of technological advancements, including with respect to AI. Our competitors may more successfully incorporate AI into their products, gain or leverage superior access to certain AI technologies, secure more strategic partnerships with key AI providers, and achieve higher market acceptance of their AI solutions. In addition, enterprise adoption of AI may significantly transform our competitive landscape. Customers may seek to vertically integrate their offerings by expanding into the markets in which we participate or using AI to develop their own software, reducing the need to purchase third-party solutions such as ours or consume them at the same or increasing rates. If this occurs, our market share could decline and our business could be harmed.

If we are not able to keep pace with technological and competitive developments, our performance may be negatively affected.

The market for search technologies, including search, observability and security, is subject to rapid technological change, innovation (such as the use of AI), evolving industry standards, and changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements, and preferences. Our success depends on our ability to continue to innovate, enhance existing products, expand the use cases of our products, anticipate and respond to changing customer needs, requirements, and preferences, and develop and introduce in a timely manner new offerings that keep pace with technological and competitive developments.

Table of Contents

We have experienced delays in releasing new products, deployment options, and product enhancements and may experience similar delays in the future. As a result, in the past, some of our customers deferred purchasing our products until the next upgrade was released. Future delays or problems in the installation or implementation of our new releases may cause customers to forgo purchases of our products and purchase products of our competitors or not upgrade our products to higher performing levels.

The success of new product introductions depends on a number of factors that include timely and successful product development, market acceptance, our ability to manage the risks associated with new product releases and their maintenance, the availability of software components for new products, the effective management of development and other spending in connection with anticipated demand for new products, the availability of newly developed products, and the risk that new products may have defects in the early stages of introduction. We have experienced bugs, errors, or other defects in new products and product updates and may have similar experiences in the future. Further, our ability to increase the usage of our products depends, in part, on the development of new use cases for our products, which is typically driven by our developer community and may be outside of our control. We also have invested, and may continue to invest, in the acquisition of complementary businesses, technologies, services, products, and other assets that we expect will expand the products that we can offer our customers. We may make these investments without being certain that they will result in products or enhancements that will be accepted by existing or prospective customers. If we are unable to enhance our existing products to meet evolving customer requirements, increase adoption and usage of our products, or develop new products, or if our efforts to increase the usage of our products are more expensive than we expect, our business, results of operations, and financial condition could be adversely affected.

The length of our sales cycle can be unpredictable, particularly with respect to sales through our channel partners or sales to large customers, and our sales efforts may require considerable time and expense, which could negatively affect our cash flows and results of operations.

Our results of operations may fluctuate, in part, because of the length and variability of the sales cycle of our subscriptions and the difficulty in making short-term adjustments to our operating expenses. Our results of operations depend upon sales to new customers, including large customers, and increasing sales to existing customers. The length of our sales cycle, from initial contact with our sales team to contractually committing to our subscriptions, can vary substantially from customer to customer based on the complexity of our offerings as well as whether a sale is made directly by us or through a channel partner. Our sales cycle can extend to more than a year for some customers, and the length of sales cycles may be further extended as a result of worsening economic conditions. In addition, some customers have been scrutinizing their spending more carefully and reducing their consumption spending in the current uncertain economic environment, and we generally expect this caution to continue. We have also experienced and, if adverse economic conditions persist, may continue to experience longer and more unpredictable sales cycles. As we target more of our sales efforts at larger enterprise customers, we may face greater costs, longer sales cycles, greater competition and less predictability in completing some of our sales. A customer’s decision to use our solutions may be an enterprise-wide decision, which could require greater levels of education regarding the use cases of our products or protracted negotiations. In addition, larger customers may demand more configuration, integration services, and features. It is difficult to predict exactly when, or even if, we will make a sale to a potential customer or if we can increase sales to our existing customers. As a result, large individual sales in some cases have occurred in quarters subsequent to those we expected, or have not occurred at all. Lengthened or unpredictable sales cycles that cause a loss or delay of one or more large transactions in a quarter could affect our cash flows and results of operations for that quarter and for future quarters. These impacts are amplified in the short term when customers slow their consumption in response to the uncertain macroeconomic environment. Because a substantial proportion of our expenses are relatively fixed in the short term, our cash flows and results of operations could suffer if revenue falls below our expectations in a particular quarter.

Because we recognize the vast majority of the revenue from subscriptions, either based on actual consumption or ratably over the term of the relevant subscription period, downturns or upturns in sales are not immediately reflected in full in our results of operations.

Subscription revenue accounts for the substantial majority of our revenue, constituting 94% of our total revenue for the year ended April 30, 2026 and 93% of our total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2025 and 2024. The effect of significant downturns in new or renewed sales of our subscriptions is not reflected in full in our results of operations until future periods. We recognize the vast majority of our subscription revenue either based on actual consumption or ratably over the term of the relevant time period. As a result, much of the subscription revenue we report each fiscal quarter represents the recognition of deferred revenue from subscription contracts entered into during previous fiscal quarters. Consequently, a decline in new or renewed subscriptions in any one fiscal quarter will not be fully or immediately reflected in revenue for that fiscal quarter and will negatively affect our revenue for future fiscal quarters.

Table of Contents

We expect our revenue mix to vary over time, which could harm our gross margin and operating results.

We expect our revenue mix to vary over time as a result of a number of factors, any one of which or the cumulative effect of which may result in significant fluctuations in our gross margin and operating results. We expect that revenue from Elastic Cloud, which contributed 48%, 46%, and 43% of our total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2026, 2025, and 2024, respectively, will continue to become a larger part of our revenue mix. We may experience a shift in revenue mix from cloud to self-managed in areas particularly affected by evolving international trade policies. Under the differing revenue recognition policies applicable to our subscriptions and services, shifts in our business mix from quarter to quarter could produce substantial variation in the revenue we recognize. The variation in our revenue also may result from the growth of consumption-based arrangements for our Elastic Cloud offerings, where the revenue we recognize is tied to our customers’ actual usage of our products, and from a further reduction in usage by customers already using a consumption-based arrangement due to the uncertain macroeconomic environment. Further, our gross margins and operating results could be harmed by changes in revenue mix and costs, together with numerous other factors, including our entry into new markets or growth in lower margin markets; our entry into markets with different pricing and cost structures; pricing discounts; and increased price competition.

The loss of one or more members of our senior management and other key employees or an inability to attract and retain highly skilled employees could harm our business.

Our future success depends, in part, on our ability to continue to attract and retain highly skilled personnel. The loss of the services of any of our key personnel, the inability to attract or retain qualified personnel, or delays in hiring required personnel, particularly in engineering and sales, may seriously harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Our ability to attract additional qualified personnel may be impacted by the economic uncertainty and insecurity caused by macroeconomic factors and geopolitical events or a shortage of qualified personnel, particularly in the technology sector for skilled AI workers. The loss of services of any of our key personnel also increases our dependence on other key personnel who remain with us. Although we have entered into employment offer letters with our key personnel, their employment is for no specific duration and constitutes at-will employment. We are also substantially dependent on the continued service of our existing engineering personnel because of the complexity of our products.

Our future performance also depends on the continued service and continuing contributions of our senior management to execute our business strategy and to identify and pursue new opportunities and product innovations. We do not maintain key person life insurance policies on any of our employees. The loss of services of members of our senior management could significantly delay or prevent the achievement of our development and strategic objectives. Any search for senior managers in the future or any search to replace the loss of any senior managers may be protracted, and we may not be able to attract a qualified candidate or replacement in a timely manner or at all, particularly as potential candidates may be less willing to change jobs in periods of unstable economic conditions caused by macroeconomic and geopolitical events.

The industry in which we operate is generally characterized by significant competition for skilled personnel as well as high employee attrition. The increased availability of hybrid or remote working arrangements within our industry has further expanded the pool of companies that can compete for our employees and employment candidates. We may not be successful in attracting, integrating, or retaining qualified personnel to fulfill our current or future needs. Changes to immigration laws or the availability of work visas could adversely affect our ability to attract, hire, and retain qualified personnel. We may need to invest significant amounts of cash and equity to attract and retain new employees, and we may not realize returns on these investments. Further, to the extent we hire personnel from competitors, we may be subject to allegations that they have been improperly solicited, that they have divulged proprietary or other confidential information, or that their former employers own their inventions or other work product.

If we do not effectively develop and expand our sales and marketing capabilities, including expanding, training, and compensating our sales force, we may be unable to add new customers, increase sales to existing customers or expand the value of our existing customers’ subscriptions.

We dedicate significant resources to sales and marketing initiatives, including in markets in which we have limited or no experience. Our business and results of operations will be harmed if our sales and marketing efforts do not generate significant revenue increases or generate increases that are smaller than anticipated.

Table of Contents

We may not achieve revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, train, and retain talented and effective sales personnel. We depend upon our sales force to obtain new customers and to drive additional sales to existing customers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel, including sales representatives, sales managers, and sales engineers, with the requisite skills and technical knowledge. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training and retaining sufficient sales personnel to support our growth, and as we introduce new products, solutions, and marketing strategies, we may need to re-train existing sales personnel. Newly hired employees also require extensive training, which may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Employees we have recently hired may not become productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. As we continue to grow significantly, a large portion of our sales force will have relatively little experience working with us, our subscriptions, and our business model. Additionally, we may need to evolve our sales compensation plans to drive the growth of our subscription-based offerings, including our Elastic Cloud offerings with consumption-based arrangements. Such changes may have adverse consequences if they are not designed effectively. Our growth and results of operations could be negatively impacted if we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, our new and existing sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time, our sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new customers or increasing sales to our existing customer base, or our sales and marketing programs, including our sales compensation plans, are not effective.

Our failure to offer high-quality customer support could have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

After our products are deployed within our customers’ IT environments, our customers depend upon our technical support services to resolve issues relating to our products. If we do not succeed in helping our customers quickly resolve post-deployment issues or provide effective ongoing support and education with respect to our products, our ability to renew or sell additional subscriptions to existing customers or expand the value of existing customers’ subscriptions would be adversely affected and our reputation with potential customers could be damaged. Many larger enterprise and government entity customers have more complex IT environments and require higher levels of support than smaller customers. If we fail to meet the requirements of these larger customers, we may be unsuccessful in increasing our sales to them.

In addition, it can take several months to recruit, hire, and train qualified technical support employees. We may not be able to hire such employees fast enough to keep up with demand, particularly if the sales of our offerings exceed our internal forecasts. The uncertainty related to macroeconomic conditions may result in more competition for qualified employees and delays in hiring, onboarding, and training new employees. To the extent that we are unsuccessful in hiring, training, and retaining adequate support resources, our ability to provide adequate and timely support to our customers, and our customers’ satisfaction with our offerings, will be adversely affected. Our failure to provide and maintain, or a market perception that we do not provide or maintain, high-quality support services could have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

We may not be able to realize the benefits of our marketing strategies to offer some of our product features free of charge and to provide free trials of some of our paid features.

We are dependent on lead generation strategies, including offers of free use of some of our product features and free trials of some of our paid features. These strategies may not be successful in continuing to generate sufficient sales opportunities necessary to increase our revenue. Many users never convert from the free use model or from free trials to the paid versions of our products. To the extent that users do not become, or we are unable to attract, paying customers, we will not realize the intended benefits of these marketing strategies and our ability to grow our revenue will be adversely affected.

Our international operations and expansion expose us to a variety of risks.

As of April 30, 2026, we had customers located in over 125 countries as we pursue our strategy to continue to expand internationally. In addition, as of April 30, 2026, as a result of our strategy of leveraging a distributed workforce, we had employees located in over 40 countries. Our current international operations involve and future initiatives may involve a variety of risks, including:

•political and economic instability related to international disputes and conflicts and the related impact on macroeconomic conditions as a result of such conflicts, which may negatively impact our customers, partners, and vendors;

•unexpected changes in regulatory requirements, taxes, trade laws, export quotas, custom duties or other trade restrictions;

•more expansive legal rights of foreign unions and works councils as well as different labor regulations, especially in the European Union, where labor laws are generally more advantageous to employees than in the United States, including hourly wage and overtime regulations in these locations;

Table of Contents

•compliance with requirements to hire local employees to perform particular functions, which may not align with the manner in which we would otherwise operate our business;

•exposure to many stringent regulations relating to privacy, data protection, advertising and information security, particularly in the European Union, and potentially inconsistent laws and regulations in these areas across countries;

•changes in a country’s or region’s political or economic conditions;

•changes in relations between the United States and the European Union, including individual member states, such as the Netherlands;

•risks resulting from changes in currency exchange rates and inflationary pressures;

•risks resulting from the migration of invoicing from local billing entities to centralized regional billing entities;

•the impact of public health epidemics or pandemics on our employees, partners, and customers;

•challenges inherent in efficiently managing an increased number of employees over large geographic distances, including the need to implement appropriate systems, policies, benefits, and compliance programs;

•risks relating to enforcement of U.S. export control laws and regulations that include the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”), trade and economic sanctions, including restrictions promulgated by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), and other similar trade protection regulations and measures in the United States or in other jurisdictions;

•risks relating to our third-party vendors and service providers’ storage and processing of some of our and our customers’ data, including any supply chain cybersecurity attacks;

•reduced ability to timely collect amounts owed to us by our customers in countries where our recourse for delinquent payments may be more limited;

•limitations on our ability to reinvest earnings from operations derived from one country to fund the capital needs of our operations in other countries;

•limited or unfavorable intellectual property protection; and

•exposure to liabilities under anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended (“FCPA”), the U.K. Bribery Act of 2010, and similar applicable laws and regulations in other jurisdictions.

If we are unable to effectively manage these difficulties and challenges or other problems encountered in connection with our international operations and expansion, we might incur unanticipated liabilities or we might otherwise suffer harm to our business generally.

If we are not successful in sustaining and expanding our international business, we may incur additional losses and our revenue growth could be harmed.

Our future results depend, in part, on our ability to sustain and expand our penetration of the international markets in which we currently operate and to expand into additional international markets. We sell our offerings in international markets through direct sales and our channel partner relationships. Our ability to expand internationally will depend on our ability to deliver functionality and foreign language translations that reflect the needs of the international clients that we target. International expansion involves various risks, including the need to invest significant resources in such expansion, and the possibility that returns on such investments will not be achieved in the near future or at all in these less familiar competitive environments. We may also choose to conduct our international business through other partnerships. If we are unable to identify partners or negotiate favorable terms for our partnership arrangements, our international growth may be limited. In addition, we have incurred and may continue to incur significant expenses before we generate material revenue in particular international markets as we attempt to establish our presence in those markets.

Table of Contents

We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates, which could negatively affect our financial condition and results of operations.

A portion of our revenue is generated, and a portion of our expenses is incurred, outside the United States in foreign currencies, which exposes us to risk of fluctuations in foreign currency markets. Our results of operations and cash flows are subject to currency fluctuations primarily in the Euro, British Pound Sterling, Japanese Yen, and Australian Dollar against the U.S. Dollar. Exchange rates have been volatile as a result of geopolitical conflicts and uncertain macroeconomic conditions, and this volatility may continue. The fluctuation of currencies in which we conduct business can both increase and decrease our overall revenue and expenses for any fiscal period. In addition, increased international sales and operating expenses incurred in future periods outside the United States in foreign currencies will increase our foreign currency risk. If we are not able to successfully hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, our financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Any need by us to raise additional capital or generate the significant capital necessary to expand our operations and invest in new offerings could limit our ability to compete and could harm our business.

We may need to raise additional funds in the future, and may not be able to obtain additional debt or equity financing on favorable terms, if at all, particularly during times of market volatility, changes in the interest rate environment, and general economic instability. If we raise additional equity financing, our shareholders may experience significant dilution of their ownership interests and the per share value of our ordinary shares could decline. Further, if we engage in debt financing, the holders of debt would have priority for payment over the holders of our ordinary shares, and we may be required to accept terms that restrict our ability to incur additional indebtedness. We may also be required to take other actions that would otherwise be in the interests of the debt holders and force us to maintain specified liquidity or other financial ratios, any of which could harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition. If we need additional capital and cannot raise it on acceptable terms, we may not be able, among other actions, to:

•develop or enhance our products;

•continue to expand our sales and marketing and research and development organizations;

•acquire complementary technologies, products, or businesses;

•expand operations in the United States or internationally;

•hire, train, and retain employees; or

•respond to competitive pressures or unanticipated working capital requirements.

Our failure to have sufficient capital to take any of these actions could limit our ability to compete and harm our business.

We are subject to risks associated with our sales to government entities.

We generate an increasing portion of our revenue from sales to U.S. and non-U.S. government entities. Sales to government entities are subject to a number of risks. Selling to government entities can be highly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Government certification and security requirements for products like ours may change, thereby restricting our ability to sell into the U.S. federal government sector, U.S. state or local government sector, or government sectors of countries other than the United States until we have obtained the revised certification or met the changed security requirements. If we are unable to timely meet such requirements, our ability to compete for and retain federal government contracts may be diminished, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Government entities may have statutory, contractual, or other legal rights to terminate contracts with us or our channel partners for convenience or due to a default, and any such termination may adversely affect our future results. Government demand and payment for our offerings may be affected by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our offerings or preventing the exercise of options under multi-year contracts. There is pressure on governments to reduce spending, both domestically and internationally, particularly with respect to U.S. federal government agencies. Actions by government entities to maximize efficiency and productivity may create further delays in government contracting due to uncertainties and employee reductions, and create additional uncertainty regarding budgetary priorities, all of which could adversely affect the timing, funding, and purchases of our offerings by U.S. and non-U.S. government organizations.

Table of Contents

Contracts with government agencies, including classified contracts, are subject to extensive, evolving, and sometimes complex regulations, as well as audits and reviews of contractors’ administrative processes and other contract-related compliance obligations. Breaches of government contracts, failure to comply with applicable regulations, failure to obtain and maintain required facility or security clearances, or unfavorable findings from government audits or reviews could result in contract terminations, reputational harm or other adverse consequences, including ineligibility to sell to government agencies in the future, government refusal to continue buying our subscriptions, or fines or civil or criminal liability.

Our operations, financial results and growth prospects could be adversely affected if we are unable to maintain successful relationships with our partners, or if our partners fail to perform.

We maintain partnership relationships with a variety of enterprises, including cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, systems integrators, channel partners, referral partners, technical integration partners, OEM and MSP partners, and technology partners, to deliver offerings to our end customers and complement our broad community of users. In particular, we partner with various cloud providers to jointly market, sell and deliver our Elastic Cloud offerings, which in some instances also entails technical integration with such cloud providers. Our ability to achieve revenue growth in the future will depend in part on our success in maintaining successful relationships with our partners and in helping our partners enhance their ability to market and sell our subscriptions. If we are unable to maintain our relationships with these partners, our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows could be harmed.

Our agreements with our partners are generally non-exclusive, so that our partners may offer customers the offerings of several different companies, including offerings that compete with ours, or may themselves be or become competitors. Some of these partners may also market, sell, and support offerings that compete with ours, may devote more resources to the marketing, sales, and support of such competitive offerings, may have incentives to promote our competitors’ offerings to the detriment of our offerings or may cease selling our offerings altogether. If our partners do not effectively market and sell our offerings, choose to use greater efforts to market and sell their own offerings or those of our competitors, fail to provide adequate technical integration with their own offerings, fail to meet the needs of our customers, fail to deliver services to our customers, or if we lose one or more of our channel partners, our ability to expand our business and sell our offerings may be harmed. Our partners may cease marketing our offerings with limited or no notice and with little or no penalty. The loss of a substantial number of our partners, our possible inability to replace them, or the failure to recruit additional partners could harm our performance.

In addition, many of our new channel partners require extensive training and may take several months or more to become effective in marketing our offerings. Our channel partner sales structure could subject us to lawsuits, potential liability, misstatement of revenue, and reputational harm, if, for example, any of our channel partners misrepresents the functionality of our offerings to customers or violates laws or our or their corporate policies, including our terms of business, which in turn could impact reported revenue, deferred revenue, and remaining performance obligations.

We could be negatively impacted if the source code licenses under which some of our software is licensed are not enforceable.

ESTC US Equity

ESTC · 10-K · period ended 2026-04-30

Item 1. Business

Item 1A. Risk Factors

ESTC US Equity☆

ESTC · 10-K · period ended 2026-04-30

Item 1. Business

Item 1A. Risk Factors

ESTC US Equity