Elastic CEO Says Vector Databases Were “Never a Business” Amid Pinecone Sale Talks

Elastic’s earnings this quarter should have been the headline. The San Francisco-based company beat Wall Street forecasts with 20% revenue growth to $415 million, lifted by a 24% jump in its cloud offering. Adjusted earnings rose 71% year-over-year to $0.60 per share, far above analyst expectations. Guidance for fiscal 2026 sales was raised to $1.684 billion. By the numbers, Elastic is executing.

But what dominated attention was the company’s CEO, Ashutosh Kulkarni, and his blunt dismissal of both rivals and narratives that cast Elastic as vulnerable. Asked whether Elastic might be better off inside a larger technology company, Kulkarni was unequivocal: “Those folks don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

The sharpest moment came when the conversation turned to Pinecone, a venture-backed company in the AI ecosystem. Pinecone pioneered the idea of a managed vector database and presented itself as a core building block for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The company raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $750 million valuation, built integrations with LangChain, Anyscale, and Mistral, and claimed over 20,000 organizations as customers. Today, it is reportedly exploring a sale.

Kulkarni’s verdict is that Pinecone was never a standalone business in the first place. “We’ve always said that vector databases are a feature. They are never going to be a business in and of themselves,” he said.