Employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating projects, but this effort is often undermined by the availability of certain individuals. If a colleague with critical information is unavailable, whether on vacation or in another time zone, the rest of the team must slow down progress until that colleague responds.
Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, co-founders of Eightfold, an AI recruitment startup last valued at $2.1 billion, believe that LLMs and advances in data privacy technology can 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 they’re away.
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 and accesses internal electronic documents such as email, Slack, and Google Docs to effectively create a digital twin. Other employees in your organization can query your digital twin for instant answers about common projects and shared knowledge.
“If each person has a digital twin, you can just talk to that twin as if you were talking to that person and get a response,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.
One big hurdle is that you can’t share everything with anyone who asks. Employees often work with sensitive information or have personal files that they want to keep private from the rest of the team.
According to Ashutosh Garg, Viven’s technology solves that complex problem through concepts known as pairwise context and privacy. This allows startup LLMs to determine exactly what information can be shared across the organization and with whom.
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Viven’s LLM is smart enough to recognize personal context and recognize what information needs to be kept private, such as 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.
“This is a very difficult problem to solve, and it hasn’t been solved until recently,” Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, told TechCrunch.
Viven is already used by several enterprise clients, including Genpact and Eightfold. (Co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia continue to lead Eightfold and split their time between running the company and Viven.)
In terms of competition, Ashutosh Garg claims that no other company is working on digital twins for enterprises yet.
When he first started thinking about the idea, he wasn’t convinced there weren’t competitors. So he called Vinod Khosla and asked about it. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that no one would do something like this and agreed to invest.
Foundation Capital’s Ashu Garg was equally excited about Viven.
“When Ashutosh came to me and explained this product, the big surprise for me was that there was a horizontal problem with all the coordination and communication work, and no one was automating it,” Ashu Garg told TechCrunch.
But just because there are no direct competitors today doesn’t mean other companies won’t build digital twins for enterprises in the future. Ash Garg said enterprise search products from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI have personalization components. But if it does enter this market, Viven hopes its “pairwise” contextual technology will be its moat.
