Onyx Believes Open Source Will Dominate Enterprise Search

In the world of business, companies are sitting on mountains of internal data and info that employees need to get their jobs done or help out potential customers. But finding the right piece of information? That's often easier said than done.

Enter Onyx, a San Francisco-based startup that's tackling this issue head-on with its internal enterprise search tool. They're not alone in this race—competitors like Glean, which has raked in a hefty $600 million in venture funding, are also vying for a piece of the action. But Onyx believes it has an ace up its sleeve: it's open source.

Getting Onyx up and running is a breeze, taking just about 30 minutes. It hooks up to over 40 internal data sources, from Salesforce to GitHub and Google Drive. And if you're looking for more, enterprise users can shell out for extra features like beefed-up sign-in security and enhanced encryption.

Chris Weaver, co-founder and co-CEO of Onyx, shared with TechCrunch that he and his co-founder and co-CEO Yuhong Sun were driven to solve a problem they both faced in their engineering gigs. "We knew where things were roughly, but it was still kind of hard, [and] new people just couldn't find anything," Weaver explained. "It felt like there had to be a better way to do this."

This isn't the first rodeo for Weaver and Sun. They tried their hand at a live stats tracking app for Twitch streamers, but that went south when Twitch pulled the plug on embedded streams. Their next venture, a site to compare specialty keyboards, also didn't pan out.

But with Sun's machine learning chops and the leaps in AI tech, Onyx—originally dubbed Danswer, a mashup of "deep answer"—hit the ground running. They launched the open source project in 2023 and quickly gained traction and positive feedback.

"Ramp was actually one of the early teams that found us," Sun recalled. "At the time, we didn’t have any way for them to pay us or anything. We didn’t have support plans or paid features. For us, it was like, people really want to pay for our project. I mean, it’s free, but people want to pay for it. So, you know, maybe there’s a chance to make a business from this."

Fast forward to today, and Onyx is working with dozens of enterprises, including big names like Netflix, Ramp, and Thales Group. Sun and Weaver credit their success to going open source, which lets companies experiment without getting bogged down in long sales cycles.

"Open source is really the only way for this type of solution to scale out and get the momentum into every single business in the world," Weaver stated.

Despite the competition, including startups like Glean and companies like Klarna building their own internal tools, Onyx remains undaunted. Weaver pointed out that starting an internal search tool from scratch is no small feat, and he sees Onyx as a foundational tool for companies looking to build their own internal search products.

"We’ve seen the usage grow explosively," Sun said. "We hit a peak of over 160,000 messages in a single week. We are really hoping to lean into that organic growth and hopefully all the teams in the world will use Onyx one day."

The company recently secured a $10 million seed round, co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with Y Combinator and angel investors like Gokul Rajaram, Arash Ferdowsi, and Amit Agarwal also chipping in. Onyx plans to use the cash to beef up its team and roll out more premium features.