Employees often spend their workdays interacting and coordinating on different projects, but this can be affected by individual availability. If a team member with key insights is unavailable — whether due to vacation or being in another time zone — the entire team might experience delays until they can respond.
Eightfold co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia — of the AI recruiting startup valued at $2.1 billion — think developments in data privacy tech and LLMs could address portions of this expensive issue. Earlier this year, they introduced Viven, a digital twins startup seeking to provide employees with access to vital information from colleagues, even when they aren’t available.
Viven publicly launched Wednesday with $35 million in seed funding from FPV Ventures, Foundation Capital, Khosla Ventures, among others.
Viven builds a specific LLM for each employee, creating a digital twin by accessing their internal digital files such as Google Docs, Slack, and email. Other members of the organization are then able to query that digital twin for instant answers about common projects and shared knowledge.
“When you have a digital twin for everyone, you can communicate with their twin like you’re talking to the person and get a response,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.
A significant challenge is that individuals can’t share everything with just anyone. Employees often work with sensitive data or possess private files they don’t want shared with the wider team.
According to Garg, Viven’s technology addresses that complex issue using pairwise context and privacy. This allows the startup’s LLMs to accurately define what information can be shared and with whom within the company.
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Viven’s LLMs are sophisticated enough to understand personal context and know which information to keep private — for instance, questions about an employee’s personal life. But perhaps the most critical measure is that users can view their digital twin’s query history, discouraging inappropriate questions.
“This is a really difficult problem, and until recently, it couldn’t be solved,” Ashu Garg, a general partner at Foundation Capital, told TechCrunch.
Viven is currently being used by several enterprise clients, including Eightfold and Genpact. (Co-founders Varun Kacholia and Ashutosh Garg continue to manage Eightfold, dividing their time between that business and overseeing Viven.)
Regarding competitors, Ashutosh Garg states that no other company is presently working on enterprise digital twins.
He was unsure whether there were any competitors when initially considering the idea. So, he contacted Vinod Khosla to inquire. The well-known investor reassured Ashutosh Garg that nobody was doing this and agreed to invest.
Ashu Garg from Foundation Capital was also enthusiastic about Viven.
“When Ashutosh explained the product to me, I immediately realized: there’s this universal coordination and communication problem across all jobs that no one is automating,” Ashu Garg shared with TechCrunch.
Although there aren’t direct competitors presently, it doesn’t mean that other companies won’t develop digital twins for businesses in the future. Ashu Garg noted that OpenAI’s enterprise search products, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic include a personalization element. But should they enter this market, Viven hopes its “pairwise” context technology will be its competitive advantage.
