Eight-time co-founder raises $35 million for Viven, an AI digital twin startup that lets you query unavailable colleagues

Although employees spend most of their day communicating and coordinating projects with each other, this effort is often undermined by the availability of specific people. When a colleague with necessary information is away – whether on vacation or in a different time zone – the remainder of the team must delay progress until that person responds.

Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, co-founders of Eightfold – an AI recruiting startup recently valued at $2.1 billion – imagine advances in LLM and data protection technologies could help solve some points of this costly problem. Earlier this 12 months, they launched Viven, a start-up digital twin whose mission is to offer employees access to key information from team members, even when they are unavailable.

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

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

“When each person has a digital twin, you can just talk to it as if you were talking to that person and get an answer,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.

The fundamental obstacle is that people simply cannot share every part with everyone who asks. Employees often deal with confidential information or have personal files they wish to keep secret from the remainder of the team.

According to Garg, Viven’s technology solves this complex problem through a concept often called pairwise context and privacy. This allows startup LLMs to exactly define what information could be shared and with whom throughout the organization.

LLM managers at Viven are smart enough to acknowledge personal context and know what information must remain private – for example, questions about an worker’s personal life. But perhaps the most significant safeguard is that anyone can see the query history of their digital twin, which acts as a deterrent to people asking the improper questions.

“This is a very difficult problem to solve and until recently it was unsolvable,” Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, told TechCrunch.

Viven is already used by several enterprise customers, including Genpact and Eightfold. (Co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia proceed to steer Eightfold, splitting their time between that company and running Viven.)

On the competition front, Ashutosh Garg says no other company is yet in the business of enterprise digital twins.

When he first began considering about this concept, he wasn’t sure if there have been any competitors. So he called Vinod Khosla to ask about it. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that no one was doing this and agreed to speculate.

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally excited about Viven.

“When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, my big surprise was this: in all coordination and communication tasks, there is a horizontal problem that no one is automating,” Ashu Garg told TechCrunch.

But just because there are no direct competitors today does not imply other firms won’t build digital twins for businesses in the future. Ashu Garg said that Anthropic, Google’s Gemina, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI enterprise search products have a personalization element. However, if they do enter this market, Viven hopes that its moat will likely be pairwise context technology.