Employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating on projects, but this effort is often undermined when specific individuals are unavailable. 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, the co-founders of the AI recruiting startup Eightfold, believe that advances in large language models and data privacy technologies can help solve some aspects of this costly problem. Earlier this year, they launched Viven, a digital twins startup with a mission to grant employees access to crucial information from teammates even when those colleagues are unavailable.
On Wednesday, Viven emerged from stealth mode with thirty-five million dollars in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures, and others.
Viven develops a specialized large language model for each employee, effectively creating a digital twin by accessing their internal electronic documents such as email, Slack messages, and Google Docs. Other employees in the organization can then query that person’s digital twin to get immediate answers related to common projects and shared knowledge.
One major hurdle is that people cannot share everything with anyone who asks. Employees often handle sensitive information or have personal files they want to keep private from the rest of the team. According to Garg, Viven’s technology solves that complex problem through a concept known as pairwise context and privacy. This enables the startup’s large language models to precisely determine what information can be shared and with whom across the organization.
Viven’s large language models are designed to recognize personal context and know what information needs to stay private, such as questions related to an employee’s personal life. An important safeguard is that everyone can see the query history of their digital twin, which acts as a deterrent against people asking inappropriate questions.
Viven is already in use 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.
As for competition, Ashutosh Garg claims that no other company is tackling digital twins for the enterprise yet. He was not sure that there were no competitors when he first started thinking about the idea, so he called investor Vinod Khosla to ask. The legendary investor assured him that nobody was doing this and agreed to invest.
Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally excited about Viven. He stated that when Ashutosh described the product, the significant realization was that a horizontal problem exists across all jobs involving coordination and communication, which no one else is automating.
But just because there are no direct competitors now does not mean that other companies will not build digital twins for companies in the future. Ashu Garg noted that products from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI have enterprise search products with a personalization component. However, if they do enter this market, Viven hopes its pairwise context technology will be its competitive advantage.