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

While employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating with each other 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, co-founders of Eightfold — an AI recruiting startup recently valued at $2.1 billion — believe that advances in MBA and data privacy technologies could help solve some aspects of this costly problem. Earlier this year, they launched Viven, a digital twin startup whose mission is to give employees access to important information from their teammates even when those teammates aren’t available.

On Wednesday, Viven came 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 through access to 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 shared projects and shared knowledge.

“When everyone has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you were talking to that person and get a response,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.

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

According to Garg, Viven’s technology solves this complex problem through a concept known as dual context and privacy. This enables the startup MBA 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 they need to keep private — such as questions about an employee’s personal life. But perhaps the most important protection is for everyone to see their digital twin’s query history, which acts as a deterrent against people asking inappropriate questions.

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

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

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

He wasn’t sure there were any competitors when he first started thinking about the idea. So he called Vinod Khosla to ask about him. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that no one did and agreed to invest.

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally enthusiastic about Viven.

“When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, the big problem for me was: There is this horizontal problem across all coordination and communication functions, 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 businesses in the future. Enterprise search products Anthropic, Google’s Gemina, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI have a personalization component, Ashu Garg said. But, if they enter this market, Viven hopes “pair” context technology will be their moat.