Last Updated: 13 March 2025
Onyx has announced a $10 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from investors including Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, and Twenty Two Ventures.
The company, started just a year ago by co-founders Yuhong Sun and Chris Weaver, will use this round of funding to expand its open-source platform that helps businesses securely search and manage their collective knowledge.
Among those joining the round are notable angels such as Gokul Rajaram (Coinbase, Pinterest), Arash Ferdosi (Dropbox), Amit Agarwal (Datadog), and more. Although Onyx has not disclosed its valuation, the leadership team emphasizes how this investment underlines the rising demand for solutions that harness the power of AI while keeping data firmly under organizational control.
The enterprise world is seeing rapid shifts as generative AI matures. Yet many organizations still wrestle with siloed information across Slack, shared drives, wikis, and other tools. Onyx believes the key to unleashing AI-driven productivity lies in “enriching the general capabilities of LLMs with the unique context of individual teams.”
By pairing state-of-the-art AI search with an open-source approach, Onyx aims to make knowledge more accessible—without forcing companies to hand over control of their data.
With this new capital, Onyx plans to accelerate product development for its AI research agent, which “searches like a human would.” Instead of simply returning a quick hit from a single source, Onyx’s technology runs parallel searches across multiple tools—such as Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, and more—to gather the most comprehensive answer. If a sales team member wonders, “How did we close Bitwarden so quickly?” Onyx’s platform can investigate the relevant paths (Salesforce, email, Slack archives) and combine findings into one cohesive response.
In addition to product enhancements, Onyx will grow its engineering teams—both Full Stack and ML-focused—to keep up with “insane demand.” The goal is not just to improve existing features, but also to enable seamless customization, so customers can craft workflows that automatically handle common tasks like support tickets or internal Q&A.
Founded by Chris Weaver and Yuhong Sun, Onyx emerged from a shared frustration with how institutional knowledge was often scattered, unsearchable, and effectively lost within teams. They recognized the potential of open-source software to fix this, believing that user-driven contributions would let organizations of every size tailor AI to their specific needs. Today, Onyx’s open-source project is deployed at thousands of organizations, answering hundreds of thousands of questions each week.
Enterprises ranging from Netflix to Thales Group to fast-growing startups like Ramp rely on Onyx to save time and reduce duplicated efforts. The company’s decision to remain open-source is anchored in three core principles: ensuring data security with self-hosted solutions, enabling complete customization of AI-powered knowledge tools, and shipping faster through a developer community that has grown to over 3,000 contributors.
Beyond Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, Onyx is backed by Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Twenty Two Ventures, and renowned angel investors like Gokul Rajaram, Arash Ferdosi, Amit Agarwal, and others. Their collective involvement underscores Onyx’s promise: to deliver a configurable, privacy-first AI system that can adapt to any enterprise environment.
