Companies have a wealth of internal data and information needed for employees to complete tasks and answer questions for potential customers. But that doesn't mean that the right information can be easily found.
Onyx wants to solve that problem through an internal enterprise search tool. While other big names such as GLEAN (which raise $600 million venture capital) target market share in the HOT category, San Francisco-based Onyx has differentiators that help separate them from the pack. It's open source.
Companies can run Onyx in about 30 minutes and connect to data sources from over 40 internal enterprises, including Salesforce, GitHub, Google Drive, and more. Enterprise users can then pay for additional tiers of features, such as increased sign-in security and increased encryption.
Onyx co-founder and co-CEO Chris Weaver told him and his co-founder and co-CEO Yuhong Sun that he and Sun were uplifting to fix the issues they both saw in their respective engineering roles.
“We knew where things were roughly, but that was still a bit difficult. [and] No new people could find anything,” Weaver said. “I felt like there had to be a better way to do this.”
Onyx is not the first attempt by Weaver and Sun to build a company. Their first idea, the live stats tracking app for Twitch streamers, was on track until Twitch killed the built-in stream and essentially lost its product. Their second effort, the site that helps people compare specialized keyboards, also did not work.
However, due to Sun's background in machine learning and overall advances in AI technology, Onyx was originally called Danswer, a Portmanteau for a deep answer, but it was different. They released the original open source project in 2023 and quickly received strong momentum and feedback.
“The Lamp was one of the early teams that actually found us,” Sun said. “At the time, we had no way of paying for us or anything. There was no support plans or anything, and there was no paid features. For us, it seemed like people were really trying to pay for our projects. So it's free, but people want to pay for it. So you know, maybe there's an opportunity to make a business from now on.”
Today, the company works with a number of companies, including Netflix, Ramp and Thales Group. Sun and Weaver are primarily celebrating the company's success for their decision to open source the software. Companies were able to experiment and avoid long enterprise sales cycles.
“Open source is the only way this type of solution can help you gain momentum and gain momentum for every business in the world,” Weaver said.
We believe open source is a winning strategy for internal searches, but the team is entering a highly competitive field. Beyond startups like Glean, they face competition with companies building their own internal solutions, such as Fintech Klarna, which built the internal search and chatbot tool Kiki.
Onyx is not suppressed. Weaver says starting an internal search tool from scratch is extremely difficult, and he sees Onyx as the foundation tool for businesses that want to build their own internal search products. He said the evidence was numbers.
“We've seen usage grow explosively,” Sun said. “We have peaked over 160,000 messages in a week, and we really want to lean on that organic growth.
The company recently attracted a $10 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, attracting participation from Y-combinators and angel investors. Among them is Gokul Rajaram, a former board member of Coinbase and Pinterest. Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox. Amit Agarwal, former Chief Product Officer of Datadog.
Onyx plans to use the fund to hire staff and develop more premium features.