Viven, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, also co-founders of the AI recruiting firm Eightfold, announced Wednesday it has emerged from stealth mode with $35 million in seed funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures, with additional participation from other investors. The capital is earmarked to further develop Viven's platform, which aims to enhance enterprise communication and coordination by creating AI-powered "digital twins" of employees.
Viven's technology generates a specialized large language model (LLM) for each employee, effectively establishing a digital representation trained on their internal electronic documents, including email, Slack, and Google Docs. This system is designed to allow colleagues to query an individual's digital twin to obtain immediate answers related to shared projects and organizational knowledge, even when the human counterpart is unavailable. Ashutosh Garg stated to TechCrunch, "When each and every person has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you’re talking to that person and get the response."
A critical component of Viven's offering is its proprietary "pairwise context and privacy" technology. This feature is intended to address concerns regarding sensitive information by enabling the LLMs to accurately determine what data can be shared and with whom across the organization. Mr. Garg noted that this complex problem, previously considered "unsolvable," is now addressed by Viven's system. Furthermore, the platform incorporates a transparency mechanism, allowing employees to view the complete query history of their digital twin, serving as an audit trail.
Viven's platform is currently being utilized by several enterprise clients, including Genpact and Eightfold. Ashutosh Garg maintains that the company faces no direct competition in the specific niche of enterprise digital twins, though he acknowledges that other AI platforms, such as Anthropic, Google's Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI's enterprise search products, incorporate personalization functionalities. Viven aims for its "pairwise" context technology to serve as a key differentiator in the evolving AI landscape. Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia continue to lead Eightfold, an AI recruiting startup previously valued at $2.1 billion, while also spearheading Viven.
