Knowledge management startup Onna has raised $11 million in a Series A equity funding round, which saw Dropbox and Slack Fund investing in the company. Onna said the company will use the new investment to support its marketing team and expand the platform's capabilities in e-discovery, compliance and overall enterprise search capabilities through more integrations and tools.

The funding round was led by Dawn Capital with participation from Nauta Capital, which was the company's top investor last year when it raised $5 million.

Onna-powered technology allows in-house legal departments to search across various integrated systems and place the data in one central solution. The centralization of disparate information is key for not only e-discovery but also compliance and productivity, the company said.

Onna CEO and founder Salim Elkhou called the ability to integrate and centralize data “a new era.” “It's automatic, the collection and process is done in the background. Onna does all the heavy lifting.” 

He added that the third-party service integrations are a part of addressing corporate's data searching challenges.

“With this investment, we are doubling down with working with legal departments to make the tools and integrations that they need,” he said.

Indeed, in the June 3 press release announcing the investment, Dropbox lauded Onna's ability to search across multiple platforms.

“Information and tools people use at work are increasingly fragmented, and it's often difficult to search, locate and secure documents spread across the many tools we use. Like Dropbox, Onna is on a mission to help fix that,” said Dropbox vice president of corporate finance and strategy Lev Finkelstein.

A request for comment from Slack Fund, an investment fund started by the collaborative communication app Slack, regarding its investment into Onna wasn't answered by press time.

Apart from being an investor, Dropbox uses Onna in its corporate legal department and is one of several third-party companies that Onna integrates with. The other companies include Slack, Amazon Web Services, G Suite, Microsoft 365, Zendesk and Facebook's online communication tool Workplace.

To be sure, Onna isn't the only data management company that provides search integration. For instance, e-discovery and legal services company Exterro allows its e-discovery software to integrate with Microsoft's Office 365, Exchange and Sharepoint, online file-sharing and storing company Box and various other data sources.

Similarly, Epona in 2017 released its Legal Matter Management platform, which provides a centralized location for users to access their Microsoft Office 365 data and connected apps. Earlier this year, LexisNexis also released an expansion to its customer relationship management tool that integrates InterAction's CRM capabilities into Microsoft Office software.