Summary: Co-founders of Eightfold, Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, have launched Viven, an AI startup that creates personalized digital twins of employees to help teams access crucial information even when colleagues are unavailable. With $35 million in seed funding, Viven uses advanced language models and privacy technology to enable seamless knowledge sharing while protecting sensitive data.
The Challenge of Team Collaboration
In many workplaces, a significant amount of time is spent coordinating and communicating among team members. However, progress often stalls when key individuals are unavailable—whether due to vacation, different time zones, or other reasons. This can delay projects and create bottlenecks, as vital information remains inaccessible until the right person responds.
Introducing Viven: Digital Twins Powered by AI
Recognizing this challenge, Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, co-founders of Eightfold (an AI recruiting company valued at $2.1 billion), launched Viven earlier this year. Viven creates a specialized large language model (LLM) for each employee by securely analyzing their internal documents—such as emails, Slack messages, and Google Docs—to build a digital twin. This digital twin can then answer questions from colleagues about projects and shared knowledge, effectively standing in when the real person is unavailable.
“When each person has a digital twin, you can simply ask their twin as if you’re talking to them directly,” Ashutosh Garg explained.
How Viven Protects Your Privacy
One of the biggest challenges in creating digital twins is ensuring sensitive or personal information remains private. Employees often handle confidential data or have personal files they don’t want to share broadly.
Viven addresses this with a concept called “pairwise context and privacy.” This technology allows the digital twin to determine exactly what information can be shared with each individual in the organization, maintaining strict privacy controls.
Additionally, Viven’s LLMs can recognize personal context and avoid sharing private details, such as questions about an employee’s personal life. To further protect privacy, every user can view the query history of their digital twin, which discourages inappropriate questions.
“It’s a very hard problem to solve, and until recently, it was unsolvable,” said Ashu Garg, a general partner at Foundation Capital.
Backing from Top Investors
On Wednesday, Viven announced it had raised $35 million in seed funding from notable investors including Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures.
The idea for Viven was so unique that when Ashutosh Garg first considered it, he consulted legendary investor Vinod Khosla. Khosla confirmed that no one else was tackling this problem and decided to invest.
Foundation Capital’s Ashu Garg also expressed enthusiasm: “There’s this universal problem of coordination and communication across all jobs, and no one is automating it. Viven is addressing that gap.”
Viven’s Place in the Market and Future Outlook
Viven is already being used by enterprise clients such as Genpact and Eightfold itself, with the co-founders splitting their time between both companies.
While there are currently no direct competitors focused on enterprise digital twins, Ashutosh Garg acknowledges that companies like Anthropic, Google (with Gemini), Microsoft (Copilot), and OpenAI are developing personalized AI tools that could enter this space. However, Viven hopes its “pairwise” privacy technology will serve as a strong competitive advantage.