Enterprises have troves of internal data and information that employees need to complete their tasks or answer questions for potential customers. But that doesn’t mean the right information is easy to find.
Onyx wants to solve that problem through its internal enterprise search tool. There are other big names in the category, like Glean — which has raised $600 million in venture funding — fighting for market share in the hot category, but San Francisco-based Onyx has a differentiator that helps separate it from the pack, it says. It’s open source.
Companies can get Onyx running in about 30 minutes, and it connects to more than 40 internal company data sources, including Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive. Enterprise users can then pay for additional tiers of features like increased sign-in security and increased encryption.
Chris Weaver, co-founder and co-CEO of Onyx, told TechCrunch that he and his co-founder and co-CEO Yuhong Sun originally set out to fix a problem both he and Sun were seeing in their respective engineering roles.
“We knew where things were roughly, but it was still kind of hard, [and] new people just couldn’t find anything,” Weaver said. “It felt like there had to be a better way to do this.”
Onyx isn’t Weaver and Sun’s first attempt at building a company. Their first idea, a live stats tracking app for Twitch streamers, was going well until Twitch killed embedded streams and rendered the product essentially unusable. Their second effort, a site to help people compare speciality keyboards, didn’t work either.
But with Sun’s machine learning background and the overall advancements in AI technology, Onyx — originally called Danswer, a portmanteau for deep answer — was different. They released the original open source project in 2023 and received strong momentum and feedback right away.
“Ramp was actually one of the early teams that found us,” Sun said. “At the time, we didn’t have any way for them to pay us or anything. We didn’t have anything like support plans or whatever, and there were no 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.”
Today the company works with dozens of enterprises, including Netflix, Ramp, and Thales Group. Sun and Weaver largely credit the company’s success to their decision to open source the software. It has allowed companies to experiment and also avoid a lengthy enterprise sales cycle.
“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,” said Weaver.
