About Onyx AI Labs
What we do
Onyx AI Labs builds AI systems and trains domain models — “brains” — for expert industries. Our Forge platform turns domain expertise and documents into production-ready, locally-deployable AI models, and our Cortex line delivers citation-grounded answers with Ed25519-signed audit receipts. We train brains for clients on their own material, and we run our own in production.
Onyx AI Labs is an NVIDIA Inception program member and Cohere partner, founded by C. Michael Gibbs. Our roots are in enterprise automation and regulated industries — eighteen years of it, seven spent on AI that had to hold up under scrutiny. That experience is why we build things that survive contact with a real workload.
Our clients include financial services, healthcare, transportation and natural resources. In those industries there is no tolerance for error when working with regulators. “The AI ate my homework” is not an excuse — so we build systems that can show their work.
Offices in Toronto, New York, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Dubai. We deliver across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
A customer we're proud of
Compass — the regulatory intelligence model inside SureStep's GRC platform — is a Cortex brain built by Onyx. SureStep runs it in production for financial institutions, which makes them one of our longest-standing customers. Both companies were founded by C. Michael Gibbs. Visit SureStep
Enterprise discipline, delivered at pace.
Enterprise Methods, Any Size Business
We bring the same rigor used in Fortune 500 AI deployments — architecture reviews, threat modeling, deployment playbooks — scaled to fit your business, not your budget.
We Deploy, Not Just Advise
Strategy without execution is expensive noise. We deliver running systems — deployed into your environment with monitoring, rollback plans, and operational runbooks.
Governance By Default
Every system we build includes audit trails, approval gates, data boundary controls, and cryptographic receipts. Compliance isn't an afterthought — it's baked into the architecture.
How we got here
First Enterprise AI Engagements
Began deploying machine learning and automation systems for financial services and risk management clients. Learned what breaks in production — and what doesn't.
Governance & Compliance Specialization
Expanded focus to AI governance frameworks, regulatory compliance, and controlled deployment in highly regulated environments including banking and insurance.
First Banking AI Deployment
Delivered production AI systems for a major financial institution — model risk management, audit trails, and regulatory alignment built into every component.
APAC & EMEA Expansion
Established offices in Singapore, Amsterdam, and Dubai to serve growing demand across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.
NVIDIA Inception & Cortex Launch
Joined the NVIDIA Inception Program. Launched Cortex, our line of purpose-trained domain AI models, starting with Compass — the citation-grounded regulatory intelligence brain now running inside the SureStep GRC platform.
Forge + Legion Go Live
Released Forge (vertical LLM factory on NVIDIA stack) and Legion (multi-AI deliberation platform). Expands production AI footprint across regulated industries.
Onyx AIOps + Proving Ground
Built Onyx AIOps to monitor, govern, and receipt every AI call across providers and self-hosted models — running our own fleet first. Proving Ground benchmarks business AI on hardware buyers can actually own.
What we believe
No Black Boxes
Every decision, every model output, every system action — traceable, explainable, auditable. We don't build systems we can't inspect.
Results Over Theater
We measure success by systems running in production, not decks delivered. If it doesn't work in the real world, it doesn't count.
Depth Over Breadth
We specialize in regulated industries — financial services, risk management, compliance. Deep domain expertise beats shallow generalization every time.
Client Success Is Our Success
Our metrics are your uptime, your audit scores, your team's confidence. We win when your AI systems deliver measurable business value.
Let's work together.
Whether you're exploring AI for the first time or ready to deploy in a regulated environment, we'd like to hear from you.
Start a working session