Finding the right information, at the right time, siloed across all the different enterprise apps your company is using becomes tedious. Onna has built an advanced enterprise-wide search to help companies and their employees solve this challenge. The platform’s framework has multiple use cases and its eDiscovery function can be used across over 20 integrations that include services Slack, Dropbox, Gmail, and Zendesk. Launched in 2015, Onna is presently solving the information overload crisis in organizations such as
AlleyWatch sat down with founder Salim Elkhou to learn more about building the modern search engine to access the right information at the right time, the company’s future plans, and recent round of funding, which brings Onna’s total funding to $16M.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Our lead investor on our Series A was Dawn Capital, with participation from the Slack Fund, Dropbox, and continuous support from our early investor, Nauta Capital.
Tell us about the product or service that Onna offers.
Onna helps you find all of your disparate information in one place. While this is useful for many use cases, we are currently focused on solving needs for legal and compliance departments of large companies, where finding the right information is crucial for the business.
Onna is built on a very modern architecture and brings several innovative technologies together to bring inter-application connectivity, speed, security, and contextual organization.
What inspired you to start Onna?
I had previously founded eStet, a company in the legal discovery space that involved collecting, searching and organizing millions of files over a very short period of time. I realized that the new wave of productivity applications, particularly dynamic cloud-based apps, created a data disparity problem that weighs heavily on the enterprise and its employees. I chose to leave my operational role at eStet and focus on Onna.
How is Onna different?
Our platform actually brings several disruptive technologies together. We created three distinct innovative frameworks that make Onna what it is today and combine distinct technologies found in enterprise search, archiving, and eDiscovery, thus removing the need for multiple products: (i) one that synchronizes modern databases with fast search indexes, deriving the benefits from both, mainly in speed and security, (ii) a second that communicates with all connected systems and monitors changes across billions of files and communication channels, and (iii) a modernly architected processing platform that goes very deep across virtually any data type or language, also allowing customers to use Tensorflow models of their choosing. These frameworks are built on a containerized microservices architecture and shipped in a Kubernetes container deployable in our cloud or the customer’s private or on-prem cloud.
What market does Onna target and how big is it?
Onna is a platform for any company that has data in multiple data sources, so the market is quite large!
Onna is a platform for any company that has data in multiple data sources, so the market is quite large!
For eDiscovery, our clients are mostly internal corporate legal teams who also have the ability to collaborate with outside counsel or legal service providers. Legal and compliance teams also use us for knowledge management and information governance, but the use cases are scaling as IT can leverage Onna enterprise-wide for search and productivity.
What’s your business model?
Onna licenses based on the number of total employees in an organization. We have the Discovery offering for our core features and the Grid plan for our full feature set. We also have a usage-based offering for project-based requirements.
Who do you admire in the startup world and why?
The fighters who persevere until they see things through.
What was the funding process like?
Definitely easier than before. We really focused on our growth before looking for capital, and Dawn found us before we went searching. Several VCs contacted us around the same time, but we really liked working with the Dawn team.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Putting everything else on hold because the process is very consuming.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We’ve seen great traction recently with legal use cases, particularly as the need for eDiscovery in dynamic cloud data sources, like Slack, Dropbox, and Confluence. Our annual recurring revenue has also more than tripled over the past year.
Our investors, however, recognize the opportunity is much bigger as we are helping employees find, organize, and protect crucial business information across all these disparate applications.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
This funding will allow us to expand our market reach and accelerate the development of our solution to meet the needs of this large and growing audience.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
For us, it was the fact that my team was able to focus on the core business while I focused on the raise. Having a lot of strength amongst the team can get you through anything.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Keep doing what we’re doing better.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Based on the number of times I go, Sweetgreen wins.
