Onyx, a pioneering AI-driven deep research agent for the workplace, has secured US$10 million in seed funding. The investment round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator and renowned angel investors,

The fresh capital is set to fuel Onyx’s continued development of its AI research agent, as well as support the company’s efforts to expand its engineering, developer relations, and go-to-market teams.

The challenge of workplace knowledge retrieval

Onyx said it is at the forefront of enterprise search as an advanced open-source solution in the market.

Unlike conventional search tools, which rely on static keyword-based retrieval, Onyx mimics human search behaviour. Its AI agent simultaneously explores multiple research pathways, progressively refining its approach to surface the most comprehensive and contextually relevant insights.

This cutting-edge capability has attracted a growing roster of enterprise clients, including high-profile organisations such as Netflix and security-conscious firms such as Thales Group.

With its headquarters in San Francisco, Onyx benefits from the backing of some of the most influential investors in technology, including Gokul Rajaram of Coinbase and Pinterest; Arash Ferdosi of Dropbox; Amit Agarwal of Datadog; and Kulveer Taggar of Zeus Living, among others.

“We are excited to work with this impressive set of investors who have deep expertise in AI and open-source technology to help us bring enterprise search and GenAI to more teams around the world,” said Yuhong Sun, co-founder of Onyx.

“Having worked at high-growth tech companies, we experienced first-hand the challenges of knowledge getting buried in disparate knowledge bases and becoming lost. We built Onyx as an open-source solution for companies to solve this challenge without needing to send all their data to external parties.”

Solving the knowledge fragmentation crisis

As businesses scale, information becomes increasingly fragmented, scattered across a labyrinth of SaaS tools. Employees often waste valuable time navigating through Slack, Confluence, Google Drive, and other platforms, only to be met with outdated, incomplete, or irrelevant results.

Onyx believes it offers a smarter alternative. Acting as an always-available digital colleague, it scours information across more than 40 enterprise platforms, including Salesforce, SharePoint, GitHub, and Gong.

The company said it delivers precise answers in real time and eliminates the need for employees to send queries via Slack or Teams and wait hours for a response.

With the ability to streamline knowledge retrieval, Onyx said it has won the trust of organisations spanning industries, from entertainment giants like Netflix to cybersecurity firms such as Bitwarden.

Why investors are backing Onyx’s vision

Onyx said tech industry leaders have started to recognise its potential to transform how businesses manage and access knowledge.

“Enterprises often grapple with fragmented knowledge spread across multiple tools,” said Adina Tecklu, partner at Khosla Ventures.

“Onyx is the open-source enterprise search solution designed with privacy and security at its core. It empowers customers with instant access to critical information, eliminating the need to switch between apps or waste time searching for answers.”

The future of enterprise AI search

With its financial foundation and a growing list of enterprise clients, Onyx believes it is poised to redefine workplace search by leveraging AI to retrieve knowledge in a way that mirrors human reasoning.

The company promises to cut through the digital clutter, make knowledge instantly accessible, and turn a major workplace pain point into a thing of the past.