When key teammates are offline — whether on vacation, in a different time zone, or simply in back-to-back meetings — projects often stall as teams wait for vital information or context. Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, co-founders of Eightfold, the $2.1B-valued AI recruiting company, believe modern AI can fix that communication bottleneck.
Their new startup, Viven, is building AI-powered digital twins — secure, personalized large language models that let colleagues “ask” unavailable teammates questions and get answers in real time, without compromising privacy.
Viven emerged from stealth this week with $35 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures, and others.
Creating AI Twins That Work When You’re Offline
Viven’s platform generates a dedicated LLM for each employee, trained on that individual’s work-related documents — such as emails, Slack messages, project notes, and Google Docs. This “digital twin” can respond to queries about shared projects or organizational knowledge, mimicking the way that employee might answer.
“When everyone has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you’re talking to that person — and get the response instantly,” said Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Viven.
The system is already in use by several enterprises, including Genpact and Eightfold itself.
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Solving the Hard Problem: Privacy
One of the toughest challenges for any AI trained on personal data is privacy — ensuring that sensitive information stays confidential. Viven tackles this through a proprietary framework called pairwise context and privacy, which dynamically determines who can access what across an organization.
This allows digital twins to understand context and intent — distinguishing between professional requests (“What was the final budget for Project Atlas?”) and inappropriate ones (“Where’s Alex on vacation?”).
To further prevent misuse, employees can view the full query history of their digital twin, creating transparency and accountability.
“It’s a very hard problem to solve — and until recently, it was unsolvable,” said Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital.
A New Layer of Workplace Intelligence
According to Viven’s founders, the platform addresses a horizontal, universal problem — coordination and communication — that affects nearly every knowledge worker.
“There’s this cross-functional pain point across all jobs,” added Foundation Capital’s Garg. “No one has automated it — until now.”
Viven’s pairwise context model is designed to serve as its competitive moat, even as tech giants like Anthropic, Google (Gemini), Microsoft (Copilot), and OpenAI explore personalized enterprise AI assistants.
Backed by Industry Heavyweights
The $35M seed round was led by Khosla Ventures, whose founder Vinod Khosla personally encouraged Ashutosh Garg to pursue the idea after confirming that no one else was tackling digital twins at scale.
“When I called Vinod to ask if anyone was building this, he said, ‘Nobody is — and I want to invest,’” Garg recalled.
About Viven
Founded in 2024 by Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, Viven is an enterprise AI company developing secure digital twins that let teams access organizational knowledge instantly — even when key employees are unavailable. The company’s proprietary pairwise privacy architecture ensures contextual sharing, security, and transparency, redefining how distributed teams collaborate in real time.
