(Portfolio Profile) Onix

August 21, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Onix co-founders Nicholas Nado and David Benham joined Brian McCullough to explain why they believe the future of AI is small, specialized, and built on trust rather than scale. The company has built a platform where domain experts—starting with top-tier health and wellness professionals—can train custom AI models on their proprietary knowledge and then offer that expertise as a subscription service to users. The bet is that fidelity to a single expert's judgment and personality will beat the generic competence of frontier models, and that experts will prefer a platform that pays them 70% of revenue over one that scraped their work without permission.

The core product: expertise personified, not a digital twin

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What you'll learn

1 (01:36) **Elevator Pitch & First Use Case** - Founders Nicholas Nado and David Benham explain what Onyx does and walk through a concrete example.
2 (03:46) **How Users Access Experts** - The mechanics of the early-access app and the two ways users begin a conversation.
3 (05:30) **The Core Philosophy: Fidelity Over Scale** - Why Onyx insists on high-fidelity representations of expert knowledge, and how that drives their technical approach.
4 (07:27) **Three Layers of Data & The SLM Architecture** - Nicholas details how Onyx builds domain-specific models from public, dark, and implicit data.
5 (11:50) **Not a Digital Twin, But Expertise Personified** - The founders clarify what Onyx is and is not, emphasizing judgment over factual recall.
6 (13:56) **Business Model: Aligned Incentives** - How Onyx structures its marketplace to align the interests of experts, users, and the company.
7 (15:11) **Advanced Use Cases: Group Chats & Care Teams** - How Onyx enables multi-expert collaboration for complex care situations.

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Show Notes

In this episode, we explore Onyx, a platform that enables experts to train their own AI models to help millions with health, wellness, and personal development. Founders Nicholas Nadeau and David Bennahum discuss how their domain-specific, trust-based approach is reshaping AI and expertise sharing.