Employees spend countless hours collaborating on projects, yet progress often stalls when key team members are unavailable. Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable co-workers, aiming to solve this modern workplace bottleneck with artificial intelligence.
Image Credits:Viven
Bridging The Gap When Colleagues Are Away
Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia — the minds behind Eightfold, an AI recruiting company valued at $2.1 billion — have turned their focus to improving internal communication. Their new venture, Viven, uses AI-powered digital twins to let employees access critical information even when teammates are offline or out of office.
The startup officially emerged from stealth with $35 million in seed funding from major backers like Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures. The announcement positions Viven as a fresh player in the fast-growing AI workplace productivity space.
How Viven’s AI Digital Twins Work
Viven creates a specialized LLM (large language model) for each employee, drawing insights from internal tools such as Gmail, Slack, and Google Docs. This allows colleagues to “query” a digital twin and receive contextually accurate answers — almost as if they were speaking directly to the person.
“When each person has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you’re talking to that person and get the response,” explained co-founder Ashutosh Garg in an interview with TechCrunch.
Tackling Privacy With AI Contextual Intelligence
A major challenge in this concept is data privacy. Not every document or message should be accessible to everyone in the organization. Garg says Viven addresses this through pairwise context and privacy, a proprietary approach that determines what information can be shared — and with whom.
This ensures that personal or confidential content remains private, while work-related information flows seamlessly to the right people. Viven’s LLMs are trained to recognize context, understand permission levels, and protect sensitive data automatically.
The Future Of AI Collaboration Tools
As businesses increasingly adopt AI copilots and productivity tools, Viven’s digital twin model could redefine how teams collaborate across time zones and schedules. Instead of waiting for a reply or scheduling late-night calls, workers can instantly access verified knowledge through AI-powered teammates.
With strong financial backing and deep AI expertise from Eightfold’s founders, Viven enters a competitive but fast-growing space — one where smart, privacy-conscious collaboration tools could become the new workplace standard.
Post a Comment