Knowledge integration and e-discovery startup Onna has announced it recently closed a $5 million funding round, led by venture capitalist firm Nauta Capital. The funding represents the first capital infusion by outside investors for the Barcelona and San Francisco-based startup, which up until now had been self-funded.

Salim Elkhou, founder and CEO of Onna, noted that the funding will be used to expand Onna's commercial teams to attract more customers in the U.S. and to create more integrations for the platform and further develop its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

Jordi Viñas, general partner at Barcelona-based Nauta, said his team was impressed by “Onna's technology and the rapid growth it has experienced over the past year with customers such as Facebook.” He added that Onna's platform is “set to become fundamental” in the e-discovery collections and knowledge management space.

Onna, which has customers both in the U.S. and Europe, strives to help legal departments integrate their various data repositories into one central solution, through which they can search, access and perform e-discovery collections on an organization's information.

“From an e-discovery perspective, we are on the left side of the EDRM, focusing on the data collection of several cloud platforms from one place,” Elkhou explained.

As of now, Onna is able to integrate with over 30 cloud-based systems, including Slack, Dropbox, Confluence and Zendesk.

The AI engine used in Onna is essentially trained to understand how to extract content and its metadata within various third-party systems and render it searchable. It is also trained to “read” more static documents like PDF files and extract their content, as well as classify nonverbal content like images.

Of course, Onna isn't the only e-discovery or knowledge management platform that integrates with third-party services. Such integration has been a key feature for many legal technology providers in the e-discovery and information governance space.

While some, like Epona seek to integrate with a specific suite of software, such Microsoft Office 365, others like Thomson Reuters' Workspace and Elite 3E system, ThinkSmart, and ZL Technologies offer broader integrations to host their all their clients' data in one single platform.

Where Onna believes it stands out, however, is in the level of integration it provides.

Elkhou said that, while several platforms offering knowledge integration today just “take screenshots” of the data in third-party systems, Onna is directly connecting to the API of these systems to extract both their content and metadata.

What's more, Elkhou also believes Onna goes beyond traditional data collection with its ability to “automatically and continuously archive, hold and make immediately accessible” data from various third-party applications.

The startup also believes it is built on “a more modern architecture based on recent new developments and technologies” that allow it to better integrate with “newer platforms” that modern legal departments are increasingly relying on, Elkhou said.

Indeed, at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's May 2017 conference, Onna, as well as ThinkSmart, presented prototypes of how its platform would integrate with Amazon's Alexa smart speaker.

Though Elkhou noted that “voice commands can be an integral part of the user interface design” for Onna, he noted that such integration is not “a current priority.” He added though, that the company “may be releasing the ability to search voice in audio and video recordings in the very near future.”