Aug 23, 2026 · 1h 3m
Onyx bets expert trust can beat general-purpose AI
(Portfolio Profile) Onix
The founders present a focused alternative to broad AI: expert-controlled models that preserve relationships, privacy, and ownership while delivering personalized health guidance.
- 1Onyx lets trusted experts shape domain-specific AI models using human review and both public and implicit knowledge.
- 2Experts set subscription prices, retain 70% of revenue, and keep their intellectual property under a nonexclusive relationship.
- 3The company is deliberately starting with health and wellness, using privacy, selective recruitment, and trust as its competitive moat.
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David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau explain why they believe expert trust and relationships, rather than model scale alone, can protect Onyx from general-purpose AI.
The brief
Nicholas Nadeau and David Bennahum describe Onyx as a platform where experts create AI models that represent their judgment for personalized health, wellness, and personal-development guidance.
Its human-in-the-loop process combines public material with experts’ implicit or “dark” knowledge, aiming to capture the decisions and context that generic AI tends to flatten.
The marketplace gives experts control over pricing, 70% of subscription revenue, and their intellectual property, while users can assemble targeted AI-supported care teams around their needs.
Onyx is starting with health and wellness rather than opening every category at once, arguing that focused expertise matters more than breadth when advice affects people’s lives.
The central challenge comes from general-purpose systems such as Claude: Onyx’s answer is that trust, relationships, privacy, and domain-specific judgment form a qualitative moat.
The founders close by defending selective recruitment and data sovereignty, framing Onyx as an attempt to build an economy around people’s expertise without repeating Web 2.0’s extractive model.
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