Companies can get Onyx running in about 30 minutes, and it connects to more than 40 internal company data sources including Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive
By Ada Jain
Onyx announced on Wednesday that it raised $10 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital.
The investment also had additional participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Twenty Two Ventures and other angel investors. Among them are Gokul Rajaram, former board member at Coinbase and Pinterest; Arash Ferdowsi, a co-founder of Dropbox; and Amit Agarwal, the former chief product officer of Datadog, according to the company’s statement.
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Khosla Ventures has previously invested in OpenAI with $405 million, achieving about a 6% stake in the giant. As an AI enterprise search assistant that connects to all company tools and documents, Onyx enables internal teams to find any piece of information in a finger snap using natural language processing. Think ChatGPT, but with access to all your companies documents.
Or, imagine it like an open-source Glean. In addition to open-source usage with an MIT license, the Onyx team is working with dozens of enterprise customers. From household names like Netflix to security-conscious defense companies like Thales Group to fast growing startups like Ramp.
Founded in 2023 by Yuhong Sun, whose expertise is in Machine Learning (with specialization in NLP) as well as backend systems, and co-founder Chris Weaver brings in extensive experience in data science. Sun previously worked on Deep Learning for NL-to-SQL and Semantic Search at Alation.
“Yuhong Sun and I started Onyx nearly one year ago to make information more accessible at work. Today, our open-source project is deployed by thousands of orgs and used to answer hundreds of thousands of questions every week,” wrote Weaver on LinkedIn.
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Companies can get Onyx running in about 30 minutes, and it connects to more than 40 internal company data sources including Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive. For example, with company data available on demand through Onyx, employees can onboard independently without assistance. Currently, they offer a free (self-hosted) as well as a premium cloud version.
Beyond startups like Glean, they also face competition from companies building their own internal solutions like the fintech Klarna, which has built an internal search and chatbot tool Kiki, as well as Deepset, parent company of Haystack. One of the key differentiators for Onyx grounds in it being open source and connects to various large language models (LLMs) unlike Google’s Vertex AI and Amazon Kendra which are not open source.