Why Onyx thinks its open-source solution will win enterprise search

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.

While confident that open source is the winning strategy for internal search, the team is entering a competitive field. Beyond startups like Glean, they face competition from companies building their own internal solutions, like the fintech Klarna, which has built an internal search and chatbot tool, Kiki.

Onyx isn’t deterred. Starting an internal search tool from scratch is really hard, Weaver said, and he thinks of Onyx as a foundational tool for companies that want to build their own internal search products. He said the proof is in the numbers.

“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 also recently attracted a $10 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and angel investors. Among them are Gokul Rajaram, former board member at Coinbase and Pinterest; Arash Ferdowsi, a co-founder of Dropbox; and Amit Agarwal, the former chief product officer of Datadog.

Onyx plans to use the funds to hire staff and develop more premium features.