Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable co-workers | TechCrunch

While employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating amongst themselves on projects, this effort is often undermined by the availability of specific individuals. When a colleague with vital information is away — whether on vacation or in a different time zone — the rest of the team must delay progress until that person responds.

Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the co-founders of Eightfold — an AI recruiting startup last valued at $2.1 billion — believe that advances in LLMs and data privacy technologies can help solve some aspects of this costly problem. Earlier this year, they launched Viven, a digital twin startup with a mission to grant employees access to crucial information from teammates even when those colleagues are unavailable.

On Wednesday, Viven emerged out of stealth mode with $35 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures, and others.

Viven develops a specialized LLM for each employee, effectively creating a digital twin by accessing their internal electronic documents such as email, Slack, and Google Docs. Other employees in the organization can then query that person’s digital twin to get immediate answers related to common projects and shared knowledge.

“When each and every person has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you’re talking to that person and get the response,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.

One major hurdle is that people just can’t share everything with anyone who asks. Employees often handle sensitive information or have personal files they want to keep private from the rest of the team.

According to Ashutosh Garg, Viven’s technology solves that complex problem through a concept known as pairwise context and privacy. This enables the startup’s LLMs to precisely determine what information can be shared and with whom across the organization.

Viven’s LLMs are smart enough to recognize personal context and know what information needs to stay private — like questions related to an employee’s personal life. But perhaps the most important safeguard is that everyone can see the query history of their digital twin, which acts as a deterrent against people asking inappropriate questions.

“It’s a very hard problem to solve, and until recently, it was unsolvable,” Ashu Garg, a general partner at Foundation Capital told TechCrunch.

Viven is already in use by several enterprise clients, including Genpact and Eightfold. (Co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia continue to lead Eightfold, splitting their time between that company and running Viven.)

As for competition, Ashutosh Garg claims that no other company is tackling digital twins for the enterprise yet.

He wasn’t sure that there were no competitors when he first started thinking about the idea. So he called Vinod Khosla to ask about it. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that nobody is doing this and agreed to invest.

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally excited about Viven.

“When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, the big aha for me was: there’s this horizontal problem across all jobs of coordination and communication, which no one is automating,” Ashu Garg told TechCrunch.

But just because there are no direct competitors now doesn’t mean that other companies won’t build digital twins for companies in the future. Ashu Garg said that Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI’s enterprise search products have a personalization component. But, if they do enter this market, Viven hopes its “pairwise” context technology will be its moat.