Maureen O'Gara

Elasticsearch, the Amsterdam start-up commercializing the eponymous real-time Big Data search and analytics open source project that one of its founders started, has secured a $24 B round, roughly three months after getting a $10 million A round.

The new financing was led by Mike Volpi (pictured), the one-time whiz-kid whose M&A team at Cisco did 70 acquisitions in seven years including the $7 billion Scientific Atlanta buy who’s now a partner at Index Ventures.

Participants include first round backer Benchmark Capital and new investor SV Angel, a fund raised by Ron Conway to put money into “real-time data.” Conway is one of the Valley’s so-called super angels, who’s made a fortune as an early stage financier of Google, PayPal and Facebook among others

Conway says, “As an early investor in Google, I know how transformative search can be. Elasticsearch is bringing the power of that kind of search to companies every day, helping them analyze and understand their own data quickly and easily.”

The company, which says it’s “now in a position to fully execute on its vision without compromise,” will use the new money to attract top talent “to meet and support the increase in customer for Elasticsearch.”

CEO Steven Schuurman says, “Since we founded the company, the demand for our support and training offerings has experienced explosive growth. On a tactical level it’s vital we attract the best talent to support our customers and deliver on our product engineering ambitions as the adoption of Elasticsearch continues to accelerate.”

The outfit claims approximately 200,000 downloads a month and a total of two million altogether.

It says search is changing, and figures it’s driving the change. “Today’s search,” it says, “is a combination of real-time free text search, structured search and advanced analytics capabilities, which lets anyone easily explore large volumes of distributed data.”

The widgetry is supposed to take the pain out of scaling and maintenance. Built for a distributed environment, new nodes are provisioned automatically without any downtime, and rebalancing and routing are done behind the scenes.

IDC estimates that the search and content analytics software market will be worth $3.2 billion by 2016.

Research director Dave Schubmehl says, “Our research is showing that uses of search are expanding, with newer search applications unifying access to both data and content and that the use of open search solutions within enterprises is growing. Elasticsearch, with its recent announcements, is well positioned to take advantage of both of these trends.”