Shay Banon is Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Elastic, a publicly traded search, observability, and security platform company. He created Elasticsearch in 2009 after building a recipe search app for his wife in 2004, transforming it into one of the world's most widely used search engines.

Shay studied Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and previously served as Technology Director at GigaSpaces Technologies. He also created the Compass open source project before developing Elasticsearch.

Shay wrote the first lines of code for Elasticsearch in 2009 and co-founded Elastic in 2012 with Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, and Uri Boness. He served as CEO from 2017 until January 2022, when he transitioned back to CTO to focus on product and technology.

Elastic went public on the NYSE in October 2018, raising $252 million at a $2.5 billion valuation and closing the first day at nearly $5 billion market cap. The company raised $104 million in private funding before going public and has made strategic acquisitions including Prelert, Swiftype, and Endgame.

Elastic serves over half the Fortune 500 and powers search, logging, and analytics for companies like Uber, Netflix, Tinder, Wikipedia, and eBay. The company generated $1.48 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025 and has over 4,800 employees across 30+ countries globally.