S hay Banon is an Israeli software engineer and entrepreneur who is the creator of the open-source search engine Elasticsearch and the co-founder and CTO of the company built around it, Elastic N.V. His journey began out of a personal need. While his wife was attending culinary school in London, Banon, a software developer, decided to build her a recipe search application. This project led him to work with Lucene, a powerful open-source search library, and he realized he could build a more scalable and user-friendly layer on top of it.

This side project evolved into Elasticsearch, a distributed, real-time search and analytics engine that he first released in 2010. The technology quickly gained immense popularity among developers for its power, scalability, and ease of use. In 2012, Banon co-founded Elastic to commercialize the open-source project, offering enterprise-grade features, cloud hosting, and support. The company's 'Elastic Stack' has become a foundational technology for a vast range of applications, including website search, log analysis, and cybersecurity. Elastic's successful IPO in 2018 made Banon a technology billionaire, rewarding his vision of making powerful search technology accessible to all developers.