Enterprises have troves of inner knowledge and data that workers want to finish their duties or reply questions for potential clients. But that doesn’t imply the precise data is simple to seek out.
Onyx needs to resolve that drawback via its inner enterprise search instrument. There are different large names within the class, like Glean — which has raised $600 million in enterprise funding — combating for market share within the scorching class, however San Francisco-based Onyx has a differentiator that helps separate it from the pack, it says. It’s open supply.
Companies can get Onyx working in about half-hour, and it connects to greater than 40 inner firm knowledge sources, together with Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive. Enterprise customers can then pay for added tiers of options like elevated sign-in safety and elevated encryption.
Chris Weaver, co-founder and co-CEO of Onyx, instructed TechCrunch that he and his co-founder and co-CEO Yuhong Sun initially got down to repair an issue each he and Sun had been seeing of their respective engineering roles.
“We knew the place issues had been roughly, nevertheless it was nonetheless sort of exhausting, [and] new folks simply couldn’t discover something,” Weaver mentioned. “It felt like there needed to be a greater approach to do that.”
Onyx isn’t Weaver and Sun’s first try at constructing an organization. Their first concept, a reside stats monitoring app for Twitch streamers, was going nicely till Twitch killed embedded streams and rendered the product primarily unusable. Their second effort, a web site to assist folks examine speciality keyboards, didn’t work both.
But with Sun’s machine studying background and the general developments in AI know-how, Onyx — initially known as Danswer, a portmanteau for deep reply — was totally different. They launched the unique open supply undertaking in 2023 and obtained robust momentum and suggestions immediately.
“Ramp was really one of many early groups that discovered us,” Sun mentioned. “At the time, we didn’t have any approach for them to pay us or something. We didn’t have something like help plans or no matter, and there have been no paid options. For us, it was like, folks actually need to pay for our undertaking. I imply, it’s free, however folks need to pay for it. So, , perhaps there’s an opportunity to make a enterprise from this.”
Today the corporate works with dozens of enterprises, together with Netflix, Ramp, and Thales Group. Sun and Weaver largely credit score the corporate’s success to their determination to open supply the software program. It has allowed corporations to experiment and in addition keep away from a prolonged enterprise gross sales cycle.
“Open supply is basically the one approach for such a answer to scale out and get the momentum into each single enterprise on the planet,” mentioned Weaver.
While assured that open supply is the profitable technique for inner search, the group is coming into a aggressive discipline. Beyond startups like Glean, they face competitors from corporations constructing their very own inner options, just like the fintech Klarna, which has constructed an inner search and chatbot instrument, Kiki.
Onyx isn’t deterred. Starting an inner search instrument from scratch is basically exhausting, Weaver mentioned, and he thinks of Onyx as a foundational instrument for corporations that need to construct their very own inner search merchandise. He mentioned the proof is within the numbers.
“We’ve seen the utilization develop explosively,” Sun mentioned. “We hit a peak of over 160,000 messages in a single week. We are actually hoping to lean into that natural development and hopefully all of the groups on the planet will use Onyx sooner or later.”
The firm additionally lately attracted a $10 million seed spherical co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and angel traders. Among them are Gokul Rajaram, former board member at Coinbase and Pinterest; Arash Ferdowsi, a co-founder of Dropbox; and Amit Agarwal, the previous chief product officer of Datadog.
Onyx plans to make use of the funds to rent workers and develop extra premium options.
