SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch®, today announced the appointment of Navam Welihinda as chief financial officer, effective February 28, 2025. In this role, Welihinda will serve as the Company’s principal financial officer and principal accounting officer.
Welihinda joins Elastic from Grammarly, where he served as CFO and oversaw corporate finance and corporate development. Before Grammarly, Welihinda spent seven years at HashiCorp, including as CFO, where he played a key role in growing the company, including helping it scale to its IPO and driving profitable growth. In addition to scaling technology companies, Welihinda brings broad financial experience, including finance leadership roles at IBM and investment roles at Insight Venture Partners, American Capital Strategies, and Sierra Ventures.
“Elastic has a massive market opportunity ahead of it with our Search AI Platform and everything we continue to do for our customers around search, GenAI, observability, and security,” said Ash Kulkarni, CEO of Elastic. “Navam’s deep expertise in building multi-product, open source businesses, his experience with consumption-based products, and his proven record of driving strong financial performance will be invaluable as we progress to our next phase of growth and continue to build Elastic into a generational company.”
“Elastic has established itself as the leader in Search AI, delivering an extraordinary track record of growth and innovation,” said Welihinda. “The company’s pace of innovation, helping developers and enterprises prioritize innovation and efficiency across their businesses, using GenAI is impressive. I’m delighted to contribute to the ongoing success of our business as we move forward to our next chapter of growth.”
