Found.no

Found.no operated as a premier Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider specializing in hosted and fully-managed Elasticsearch clusters. In March 2015, the Norway-based company was acquired by Elastic, the technology firm behind the widely adopted ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). The acquisition integrated Found's team and technology into Elastic, rebranding the service as 'Found by Elastic'.

The core business of Found was to offer a turnkey solution that automated the complex processes of installing, configuring, maintaining, and backing up Elasticsearch clusters. This enabled developers and companies to integrate a powerful search engine into their applications, websites, or databases with notable speed and minimal operational overhead. The platform's value proposition was centered on accelerating time-to-market for cloud applications by abstracting away the intricacies of managing and scaling search infrastructure. Clients could scale their Elasticsearch clusters up or down without downtime, allowing them to focus on application development rather than DevOps. The service catered to a global client base, with over 500 customers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific at the time of acquisition, including prominent names like Docker, Gild, HotelTonight, Instacart, and the New York Public Library. Revenue was generated through a subscription model, with pricing based on the scale and features of the hosted service, starting from as low as $45 per month.

The acquisition was a strategic move for Elastic to offer a robust, managed Elasticsearch as a Service, not only in the cloud but with a future vision to provide it on-premise for enterprise clients. Following the acquisition, the Found service experienced over 100% customer growth within six months and expanded its availability to seven Amazon Web Services data centers globally. The integration also meant that Found became the only hosted Elasticsearch service directly operated, supported, and tightly integrated with Elastic's core products, including Kibana, Logstash, and its security and monitoring tools. The CEO of Found at the time of the acquisition was Morten Ingebrigtsen.

Keywords: Found.no, Elastic, Elasticsearch as a Service, hosted Elasticsearch, managed search, ELK stack, cloud application services, data infrastructure, search engine integration, SaaS, Morten Ingebrigtsen, cloud hosting, real-time search, log analytics, database search, automated scaling, high-availability search, developer tools, application backend, data management