Why Onyx believes his open source solution will win a search for businesses

Businesses have internal data and information that employees must perform their tasks or answer questions about potential customers. But this does not mean that the right information is easy to find.

Onyx He wants to solve this problem through his internal bus search tool. There are other big names in the category, such as Glean -Who has raised $ 600 million to finance the hot category market for market share, but the San Francisco-based Onyx has a differential to help separate it from the package, the statement said. This is an open code.

Companies can receive Onyx in about 30 minutes and it connects to more than 40 internal data sources, including Salesforce, GitHub and Google Drive. Enterprise users can then pay for additional features such as increased login security and increased encryption.

Chris Weaver, co-founder and co-executive director of Onyx, told TechCrunch that he and his co-founder and co-executive director Yuhong Sun initially ordered a problem that he and the sun see in their relevant engineering roles.

“We knew where things were, but it was still somehow difficult (s) new people just couldn’t find anything,” Weaver said. “I felt there should be a better way to do this.”

Onyx is not the first attempt of Weaver and Sun to build a company. Their first idea, a Twitch Streamer statistics tracking application, went well until Twitch kills the built -in streams and made the product essentially unusable. Their second effort, a site to help people compare special keyboards, did not work either.

But with the origin of Sun machine training and overall progress in AI technology, Onyx – originally called Danswer, Portmanteau for a deep answer – was different. They launched the original open source project in 2023 and immediately received a high speed and feedback.

“The ramp was actually one of the early teams that found us,” Sun said. “At that time, we had no way to pay us or something. We had nothing like maintenance plans or whatever, and there were no paid features. It was like people like people really want to pay for our project. I want to say it’s free, but people want to pay it. You know, there may be a chance to do a business of it. “

Today, the company works with dozens of businesses, including Netflix, Ramp and Thales Group. Sun and Weaver largely lend the success of the company the decision to open a software code. This allowed companies to experiment and also avoid a long sales cycle of businesses.

“The open code is really the only way to scale this type of solution and get an inertia in every business in the world,” Weaver said.

Although confident that Open Source is the winning internal search strategy, the team is entering a competitive field. Beyond startups like Glean, but they face competition by companies that make up their internal solutions such as Fintech Klarna, which has built up Internal search tool and chatbot, kikiS

Onyx is not deterred. Starting an internal search tool is really difficult, Weaver said, and he considers Onyx as a fundamental tool for companies who want to build their own domestic search products. He said the proof was in the numbers.

“We saw the use growing explosively,” Sun said. “We hit a peak of over 160,000 messages per week. We really hope to lean in this organic growth and hope that all teams in the world will use one day onyx. “

The company also recently attracted a range of $ 10 million seeds, led by Khosla Ventures and the first round capital, starring Y Combinator and Angel Investors. Among them are Gulkul Rajaram, a former member of the board at Coinbase and Pinterest; Arash Ferdosi, co -founder of Dropbox; And Amit Agarwal, the former Datadog Chief Product Director.

Onyx plans to use the funds for hiring and developing more premium features.