Our investment in Onna: the world’s first Knowledge Integration Platform
Salim Elkhou’s first job out of college was helping companies find relevant information internally to use in government investigations or litigations. When he saw how slow and painful that could be, he founded a company in the U.S. to provide those services faster to corporate legal departments.
As Salim and his team spent project after project looking for internal intellectual property references across emails, servers, laptops and different apps to submit for court deadlines that were always too soon, he saw his customers’ frustration. They couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find information that they themselves held internally. Salim realized that this was a big problem, and one that went well beyond just the legal departments of these companies.
Companies’ knowledge has become more fragmented with the rise of cloud-based and hosted apps — from G Suite to Slack, Salesforce to Dropbox, Confluence and Workplace. On average, companies use 88 apps to power daily workflows, a 21% increase from three years ago. That makes search between applications manual and time consuming, slowing down overall performance and productivity. Risk and compliance issues get tougher too, especially given many governments are strengthening regulations.
That’s why Salim came to Barcelona to found Onna, the world’s first knowledge integration platform. Onna integrates all workplace knowledge-based apps together, from communication to storage and HR platforms, allowing companies large and small to unify, search, protect, automate and build on top of their proprietary knowledge in a way not previously possible. After building out from Barcelona, Onna opened U.S. headquarters in New York City.
Atomico is proud to announce its investment in Onna. At Atomico, we’re excited about technology companies that help people and teams work smarter, so they can spend time on the work that matters. We were also blown away by Salim and his team’s commitment to innovation, security and customer satisfaction. As part of the round, Atomico Principal Ben Blume will join the board.
Possibilities for enterprises using a Knowledge Integration Platform like Onna include eDiscovery, information governance, enterprise search, archiving, compliance with data protection laws like GDPR and FINRA, monitoring for leaks of confidential data and building bespoke internal workflow apps using proprietary information. For small businesses, using Onna can drive individual and team productivity by reducing time wasted looking for information.
Onna is working with some of the world’s most sophisticated companies, including Slack, Facebook, Electronic Arts, Lyft, Fitbit, Newscorp and Dropbox. By 2025, Onna aims to be the core of any individual or company’s knowledge infrastructure.
We’re excited to join the Onna journey!
