Today, we're officially introducing Onyx to the world.
Onyx is a research collective building a virtual immune system: a model of how real people respond to infection, inflammation, and treatment. Every person who joins adds to it, helping researchers understand immune disease and build better medicines, faster and more safely.
Here's how we got here, and where we're going.
Where we started
When we started Onyx in early 2025, we began with a big idea: help precision medicine finally deliver for millions of patients by studying the immune system in real people, over time. That idea became a research collective, and nearly a thousand members have already joined our studies.
Seeing the whole system, over time.
The immune system doesn't stand still. It shifts with infection, inflammation, treatment, and age. Yet most research looks at narrow slices of it: one study, one data type, one moment.
Onyx studies how the immune system evolves in real people, beyond cell lines and simplified laboratory models. We measure many layers of biology, from roughly 1,000 proteins and gene expression in individual immune cells to metabolites and genetic variation. We pair these measurements with clinical histories, following how each member's immune system changes over months and years.
Together, that becomes a virtual immune system: a model of how real people respond to infection, inflammation, and treatment. It makes three things possible:
- Mechanism, not just symptoms. Researchers can trace disease to the biology driving it, and see why a treatment works for one person but not another.
- Data that grows richer over time. Every new member and every study visit adds to what we can learn about the same people, year after year.
- Ground truth for AI. Modern AI is only as good as the data it learns from. We're building that foundation, starting with the immune system, to speed up new treatments, diagnostics, and care.
People first
None of this works without our members. We see them as partners in discovery, and we use AI to serve people, not the other way around. In practice, that means:
- Study visits can happen at home, so taking part is as easy and convenient as possible.
- Protected Health Information (PHI) is never sold or shared outside of the study.
- Members get updates on research progress.
- An ethics board oversees our research studies.
What's next
To keep building, we've raised an $8M seed round led by Dimension Capital. Investors include Haystack, Refactor Capital, Standard, Robot Ventures and more. It gives us the resources to grow the virtual immune system, and to help researchers turn what it reveals into better medicines.
This is a huge milestone in Onyx's early days, and we're proud of everyone who got us here. To every member who has joined a study so far: thank you.
If you want to be part of what comes next:
— The Team at Onyx