Insider Brief
- Onyx, the first AI deep research agent for the workplace, raised $10M in seed funding, co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with backing from Y Combinator and prominent angel investors.
- The open-source AI search agent indexes knowledge across 40+ tools, retrieving relevant enterprise data instantly and eliminating the inefficiencies of traditional keyword-based searches in tools like Slack, Confluence, and Salesforce.
- Adopted by companies like Netflix, Thales Group, and Bitwarden, Onyx is positioned as a privacy-first, AI-powered enterprise search solution, helping teams work smarter and access critical information seamlessly.
PRESS RELEASE — Onyx, the first AI deep research agent designed for the workplace, has announced a $10M seed round of funding. The round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and prominent angels like Gokul Rajaram (Coinbase, Pinterest), Arash Ferdosi (Dropbox), Amit Agarwal (Datadog), Kulveer Taggar (Zeus Living) and others.
Onyx will use the funds to continue to develop its AI research agent and hire for key roles in engineering, developer relations and go-to-market.
“We are excited to work with this impressive set of investors who have deep expertise in AI and open source technology to help us bring enterprise search and GenAI to more teams around the world,” said Yuhong Sun, Co-Founder of Onyx. “Having worked at high growth tech companies, we experienced first hand the challenges of knowledge getting buried in disparate knowledge bases and becoming lost. We built Onyx as an open-source solution for companies to solve this challenge without needing to send all their data to external parties.”
As teams scale, knowledge becomes scattered, irretrievable across a sprawl of SaaS tools. Employees right now have to search through Slack, Confluence, Google Drive and other tools to find information only to be let down by outdated keyword-based searches.
Onyx acts as your most knowledgeable coworker, available 24/7. It is the first AI research agent designed for the workplace that searches like a human would. Onyx’s agent explores parallel pathways and iteratively digs down promising directions to retrieve the most complete context for each question. It indexes knowledge across more than 40 tools such as Salesforce, Sharepoint, GitHub, Gong and more. Instead of pinging someone over Slack/Teams and waiting minutes or hours to get a response, you can ask Onyx anything and get an answer instantly.
Dozens of enterprise customers are choosing Onyx to help their teams work smarter, from household names like Netflix to security conscious defense organizations like Thales Group or cybersecurity companies like Bitwarden.
“Enterprises often grapple with fragmented knowledge spread across multiple tools,” said Adina Tecklu, Partner at Khosla Ventures. “Onyx is the open-source enterprise search solution designed with privacy and security at its core. It empowers customers with instant access to critical information, eliminating the need to switch between apps or waste time searching for answers.”
“At First Round, we invest in founders who have huge visions and see things differently than everyone else. This is exactly how I’d describe Yuhong and Chris. While they zeroed in on a practical and important use case for agentic AI — enterprise search — they knew that companies care deeply about privacy and security, which is one of many reasons why their Open Source approach makes so much sense. And when I spoke with customers on reference calls before investing, the reviews were so glowing that it made the decision to invest quite easy.”
About Onyx
Onyx is the biggest open source enterprise search solution. They are leading the space with the first AI agent designed for the workplace to search like a human would. Onyx’s agent explores parallel pathways and iteratively digs down promising directions to retrieve the most complete context for each question. Dozens of enterprise customers are choosing Onyx to help their teams work smarter from household names like Netflix to security conscious defense companies like Thales Group. Onyx is based in San Francisco and backed by Khosla Venture, First Round Capital, Y Combinator and prominent angels. Learn more at http://www.onyx.app.
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Featured image: Credit: Onyx
