Zoom has acquired Onyx, a San Francisco startup that makes an open-source AI platform for enterprise search and knowledge management. Onyx's co-founders, Chris Weaver and Yuhong Sun, announced on the company blog on October 21, 2026, that Onyx is joining Zoom, and Zoom published its own announcement on October 23.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Zoom said the deal has been completed and that the Onyx team has joined the company.
Onyx will keep running as its own product. Zoom said Onyx "will remain a standalone platform and it will stay open source, model-agnostic, app-agnostic, and self-hostable." The founders told customers that nothing about how they use Onyx is changing, describing it as the same product, the same team and the same service.
What Onyx built
Onyx connects to the applications a company already uses and lets employees and AI agents search and ask questions across them. Zoom said the platform connects to more than 50 enterprise applications and serves real-time context to both people and AI agents.
The project started in 2023 under the name Danswer, a contraction of "deep answer", TechCrunch reported in March 2025. Zoom said Onyx processes more than one million user queries a week and named NASA, Nebius and Hudson River Trading among its users. Zoom also said Onyx has a community of more than 30,000 developers.
Customers can run the software on their own infrastructure or use a managed version. On its blog, Onyx said self-hosted deployments are not affected by the deal, and that for managed deployments no Zoom staff outside the Onyx team have access to customer data. The company said it is building a Zoom connector.
The two announcements describe the product's reach slightly differently. Onyx's own post says it offers more than 40 connectors and handles over a million queries a week, while Zoom put the number of connected enterprise applications at more than 50.
“It remains our biggest honor to partner with you and to be trusted with your organization’s knowledge.”
Why Zoom is buying
Zoom describes itself as an AI-first work platform and calls its goal "Conversation to Completion", turning what is said in meetings into finished work. Three days before announcing the Onyx deal, at its Zoomtopia event on October 20, 2026, it presented a new Unified Context Layer meant to turn meeting conversations into completed work.
Onyx is meant to fill a gap in that plan. In its announcement, Zoom argued that general AI models can answer questions about the world but lack the perspective of a specific company, its documents, tickets and internal knowledge. Onyx supplies that company-specific context, and Zoom said it will add the technology to Zoom AI Services.
The founders framed the deal the same way, writing that Onyx will provide the context layer for Zoom's "Conversation to Completion" strategy while continuing to serve its existing customers.
The founders and the funding
Weaver and Sun ran Onyx as co-CEOs. In March 2025 the company raised a $10 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, TechCrunch reported. Angel investors in that round included Gokul Rajaram, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and Amit Agarwal, the former chief product officer of Datadog.
At the time of the seed round, Onyx said its customers included Netflix, Ramp and Thales Group. Neither company disclosed how many Onyx employees are joining Zoom.
What happens to customers
"Same product, same team, same service," the founders wrote in their note to customers, adding that Onyx will stay open source and standalone. Onyx said it serves hundreds of enterprises and hundreds of thousands of people. Because the software can be self-hosted, companies that run Onyx on their own servers keep their deployments as they are.
Zoom did not say when Onyx features will appear inside its own products, beyond saying that the technology will be added to Zoom AI Services. It also did not give a price or say how the deal was paid for.
