Elastic NV delivered a strong start to fiscal 2026 with Q1 revenue of $415.3 million, up 20% year over year and 18% on a constant-currency basis. Subscription revenue excluding monthly Elastic Cloud rose 22% YoY, underscoring durable demand across cloud and self-managed deployments. Management highlighted AI-led demand across the Elastic Stack, including Gen AI workloads, embeddings, and vector search, which is supporting both the core search business and platform consolidation across observability and security. The company maintained a high gross margin (non-GAAP gross margin around 79% per management) and achieved a non-GAAP operating margin of 16%, aided by continuous leverage in a consumption-friendly model and a one-time cloud infra credit that temporarily boosted gross margin. Elastic exited Q1 with a robust balance sheet, generating substantial operating cash flow ($104.8 million) and free cash flow ($104.2 million; adjusted FCF margin of 28%), while cash and equivalents plus short-term investments totaled roughly $2.0 billion, yielding a net cash position. management raised full-year revenue guidance for fiscal 2026 to $1.679-1.689 billion (about 14% growth at the midpoint) and provided Q2 guidance of $415-417 million with non-GAAP EPS of $0.56-$0.58. With a large and expanding Gen AI footprint (over 2,200 Elastic Cloud customers using Elastic for Gen AI use cases; more than 330 with ACV >$100k), a broad-based multi-solution platform (search, observability, security), and a defensible data-retrieval/Moat centered on relevance, Elastic is positioned for a long growth runway into 2026 and beyond. Key risks include macro variability, execution in migrations (security/observability platform consolidations take time), and ongoing competitive dynamics in security and SIEM-adjacent markets. Investors should monitor ARR mix, CRPO trajectory, the pace of serverless adoption, federal government wins (FedRAMP/GSA), and the evolution of AI-enabled use cases across cloud and self-managed deployments.