The Eightfold co-founders just cracked one of the workplace's most expensive problems: what happens when crucial teammates are unreachable. Their new startup Viven emerged from stealth today with $35 million in seed funding to build AI digital twins that let employees query unavailable colleagues' knowledge instantly.
Viven just solved the $100 billion workplace coordination problem that every company faces but nobody talks about. When your colleague with critical project info is on vacation in Bali or sleeping in a different time zone, your entire team grinds to a halt. It's the kind of friction that makes enterprise software executives wake up in cold sweats.
Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia know this pain intimately. The Eightfold co-founders built their AI recruiting platform into a $2.1 billion unicorn by automating human bottlenecks, and now they're applying that same playbook to workplace communication. Today, their stealth startup emerged with $35 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures.
The concept sounds like science fiction but works remarkably simply. Viven creates a specialized large language model for each employee by ingesting their internal communications - emails, Slack threads, Google Docs, project files. Other team members can then query that person's "digital twin" as if they're having a conversation with the actual colleague. "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," Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.
The privacy implications are staggering, but that's exactly where Viven thinks it has cracked the code. The company's "pairwise context and privacy" technology determines precisely what information each digital twin can share with specific colleagues. Personal conversations about weekend plans stay locked away, while project updates and technical knowledge flow freely to authorized team members. Every query gets logged in a transparent history that the original employee can review - creating a natural deterrent against inappropriate snooping.
"It's a very hard problem to solve, and until recently, it was unsolvable," Foundation Capital general partner Ashu Garg told TechCrunch. The breakthrough came from combining advances in large language models with sophisticated privacy controls that didn't exist even two years ago.
The timing couldn't be better. Remote work has amplified coordination challenges, while AI capabilities have finally matured enough to handle nuanced workplace context. Genpact and Eightfold are already using Viven internally, with early results showing dramatic reductions in project delays and email ping-pong.
When Ashutosh Garg first conceived the idea, he wasn't sure if competitors existed. So he called Vinod Khosla directly. The legendary investor not only confirmed Viven had a clear field but immediately agreed to lead the funding round. "When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, the big aha for me was: there's this horizontal problem across all jobs of coordination and communication, which no one is automating," Ashu Garg explained to TechCrunch.
The competitive landscape won't stay empty forever. Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI's enterprise tools, and Anthropic all have personalization features that could evolve into digital twin capabilities. But Viven's founders believe their pairwise privacy technology creates a defensible moat that'll be hard to replicate.
Both co-founders are splitting time between Eightfold and Viven - a juggling act that speaks to their confidence in the digital twin market. They're betting that workplace AI will evolve from simple chatbots to sophisticated representations of human knowledge and context. If they're right, every enterprise employee could soon have an AI double working around the clock.
Viven represents the next evolution of workplace AI - moving beyond basic automation to create sophisticated digital representations of human knowledge and availability. With experienced founders, top-tier backing, and early enterprise traction, the startup is positioned to tackle one of the most pervasive yet overlooked productivity drains in modern business. The real test will be whether employees embrace having AI doubles of themselves, and whether Viven's privacy controls prove robust enough for enterprise-scale deployment.
