· Press · 2 min read
Canada's Moment to Build Is Now: BetaKit on Onix's $5M Raise
BetaKit covers Onix's $5M USD pre-seed raise: small models, on-device privacy, and why the founders are building in Montréal.
BetaKit, the publication of record for Canadian tech and startup news, covered Onix’s $5 million USD ($6.9 million CAD) pre-seed convertible note round in Onix raises $5 million USD to create AI library of health and wellness “experts”, by Madison McLauchlan.
The round was led by Los Angeles-based AlphaEdison, with participation from Kitchener-Waterloo’s Garage Capital, New York-based Ride Home Fund, United Talent Agency co-founder Jeremy Zimmer, and Real Ventures co-founder Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer.
Why we don’t want your data
Co-founder and CTO Nicholas Nadeau told BetaKit that Onix’s model does not depend on collecting user data:
We don’t want our users’ data. We don’t have a data bottleneck because our experts bring us all the data.
— Nicholas Nadeau, Co-founder and CTO of Onix
Health and wellness experts, from psychiatrists to nutritionists, choose to join Onix and license their work in exchange for a revenue share, so the company trains on what an expert has agreed to share, not on scraped user conversations.
Small models, on-device, no logs
Co-founder and CEO David Bennahum described the trust problem generic AI now faces:
In this climate, AI is the most disliked new technology ever polled, probably since atomic weapons.
— David Bennahum, Co-founder and CEO of Onix
Onix’s answer is architectural, not a promise. All chat data is stored locally on a user’s device, and no conversation logs are kept. Because the models run locally, there is no path for a conversation to reach a data centre, here or abroad. Bennahum also pointed to the cost side of small, domain-specific models: he told BetaKit that Onix’s inference costs run at roughly one two-hundredth of a frontier model, the efficiency that makes a private, always-on product affordable.
Building this under Canadian privacy law
Bennahum connected the company’s Montréal roots to the trust it is asking users to extend:
Brand Canada has a level of trust, and we believe trust is at the centre of the future of AI.
— David Bennahum, Co-founder and CEO of Onix
Canada’s moment to build is now. Read the full BetaKit feature for the complete story on the raise, and visit onix.life to meet the experts building on Onix.
