Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable coworkers | TechCrunch
Key Takeaways
- Viven, a digital twins startup founded by Eightfold's co-founders, raised $35 million in seed funding.
- The company uses specialized LLMs trained on an employee's internal documents (email, Slack, etc.) to create a 'digital twin'.
- The digital twin allows colleagues to query for crucial information from an unavailable teammate immediately.
- Viven employs 'pairwise context and privacy' technology to precisely manage what information can be shared and with whom.
- The startup is already in use by enterprise clients, including Genpact and its sister company, Eightfold.
Viven, a digital twins startup founded by Eightfold co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, has successfully emerged from stealth mode, securing $35 million in seed funding from investors including Khosla Ventures and Foundation Capital. The company aims to solve workflow bottlenecks caused by the unavailability of colleagues holding vital information by creating a digital twin for every employee using specialized LLMs trained on their internal documents. This technology allows other employees to query the twin for immediate project-related answers, mimicking a conversation with the actual person. A critical component of Viven's offering is its 'pairwise context and privacy' system, which ensures sensitive or personal information remains private, solving a major hurdle in knowledge sharing. Furthermore, the transparency of query history for each digital twin acts as a safeguard against inappropriate use, a problem the founders believe was previously unsolvable. While Viven is already being used by enterprises like Genpact and Eightfold, the founders anticipate future competition from large AI players, banking on their unique context technology as a competitive moat.
