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Big data search startup Elasticsearch raises $10m

"The big data dark ages are now finally behind us," the company's founders say, and they now have the money to prove it.
Written by Andrew Nusca, Contributor
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Amsterdam-based startupElasticsearch prides itself on its open source distributed search engine, which aims to help website administrators who suddenly realize: "Whoa, search is harder than I thought."

How do you get site search to work painlessly and scale indefinitely? That's the problem the six-month-old company is trying to solve. It now has $10 million to help it get there.

Founders Steven Schuurman and Shay Banon announced this morning that they raised the Series A funds from venture firm Benchmark Capital (led by Peter Fenton), as well as Rod Johnson and Data Collective. 

Schuurman co-founded SpringSource (which makes Java application development tools) with Johnson and took funding from Fenton before the company was acquired by VMware in 2009. So it's a reunion of sorts.

Banon is the brains behind the engine itself, designed to be a runtime environment that allows people to analyze and act on massive volumes of data in real time. It "doesn't require you to be a data scientist to put it to good use," the company says, which is a large part of the product's appeal.

Elasticsearch the company was founded this year to support and service the growing user base of the search engine. The project has seen 1.6 million downloads to date, with about 200,000 more per month, "making it one of the most rapidly adopted solutions in big data...used in mission critical applications by thousands of companies worldwide," the company says.

Elasticsearch's raison d'etre is to bring Apple-like simplicity to big data complexity. With its bank account suddenly bulging, the startup's greatest challenge is to resist deviating from its original vision as it grows. We'll see how it fares.

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