Employees spend a significant part of their day communicating and coordinating on projects. However, this effort is often disrupted when a specific colleague is unavailable. Whether a teammate is on vacation or in a different time zone, the entire team can face delays until that person responds.
Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the co-founders of the AI recruiting startup Eightfold, believe new technology can address this costly problem. Earlier this year, they launched a new company called Viven. This digital twins startup aims to give employees access to crucial information from their teammates, even when those colleagues are unavailable.
Viven recently emerged from stealth mode with thirty-five million dollars in seed funding. The funding round included investments from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures, among others.
The company creates a specialized large language model for each employee, effectively building a digital twin. This is done by accessing an individual’s internal documents, such as email, Slack messages, and Google Docs. Other employees within the organization can then query that person’s digital twin to get immediate answers about common projects and shared knowledge.
A significant challenge is that employees cannot share all their information. People often handle sensitive data or have personal files they wish to keep private from the rest of their team. Viven’s technology addresses this complex issue through a concept called pairwise context and privacy. This allows the startup’s large language models to determine precisely what information can be shared and with whom across the company.
The models are designed to recognize personal context and understand what information should remain private, such as questions about an employee’s personal life. An important safeguard is that everyone can view the query history of their own digital twin. This visibility acts as a deterrent against people asking inappropriate questions.
The problem Viven is solving is very difficult, and until recently, it was considered unsolvable. The company is already being used by several enterprise clients, including Genpact and Eightfold. The co-founders, Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, continue to lead Eightfold while also splitting their time to run Viven.
Regarding competition, Ashutosh Garg claims that no other company is currently tackling digital twins for the enterprise. When he first considered the idea, he was not entirely sure there were no competitors, so he called the legendary investor Vinod Khosla. Khosla confirmed that nobody was doing this and agreed to invest.
Another investor, Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital, was equally excited about Viven. He noted that the product addresses a universal problem of coordination and communication across all jobs, which no one else is automating.
While there are no direct competitors now, other companies may build similar digital twin solutions in the future. Current enterprise search products from companies like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have personalization components. If these companies do enter the market, Viven hopes its pairwise context technology will serve as its competitive advantage.