S teven Schuurman is a self-made Dutch billionaire and a pioneer in the open-source software industry. He is a co-founder of two separate billion-dollar unicorn technology companies: Elasticsearch and Elastic. He and his partners founded Elasticsearch, the company behind the popular open-source search and analytics engine of the same name. The software became a major global success, used by a vast number of companies to power their search and data analytics applications.

They later founded the company Elastic to commercialize and provide enterprise-grade support and services for the open-source software. He served as the company's CEO for many years, guiding it through its period of rapid growth and its successful IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. He has since stepped back from an executive role at the company but remains a major shareholder. He is also a prominent philanthropist and a major political donor in the Netherlands.