Founded by Eightfold’s co-founders, Viven uses personalized LLMs to let employees query unavailable teammates—while preserving privacy with context-aware access controls.
Viven: Solving the “Unavailable Colleague” Problem
Workplace productivity often hinges on timely access to information, but progress stalls when key colleagues are unavailable—whether due to time zones, vacations, or sick days. Viven, a new startup from Eightfold co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, aims to solve this bottleneck by creating AI-powered digital twins for every employee.
- These twins are customized LLMs (large language models) trained on a person’s internal documents like emails, Slack messages, and Google Docs.
- Team members can query a digital twin to get insights or updates without needing the real person to be online.
- “You can just talk to their twin as if you’re talking to that person,” said CEO Ashutosh Garg.
The concept could transform knowledge flow inside companies, reducing delays caused by individual unavailability.
$35M in Seed Funding and Enterprise Traction
Viven has officially emerged from stealth mode with a $35 million seed round backed by:
- Khosla Ventures
- Foundation Capital
- FPV Ventures
- And other undisclosed investors
Early customers already include Genpact and Eightfold, validating the technology in real-world enterprise settings.
How It Works: Digital Twins with Built-In Privacy
At the heart of Viven’s platform is the ability to create personalized digital twins while maintaining rigorous data privacy:
- The system uses “pairwise context and privacy”, meaning what one person can access is dynamically based on their relationship and history with the original employee.
- The LLM is smart enough to know what’s appropriate to share, filtering out personal or sensitive information.
- A transparent query history lets each employee monitor who’s asked what to their twin—creating accountability and preventing abuse.
“It’s a very hard problem to solve, and until recently, it was unsolvable,” said Ashu Garg, General Partner at Foundation Capital.
This privacy architecture is the core of Viven’s competitive moat, as it enables responsible AI deployment in sensitive enterprise environments.
Targeting a Universal Bottleneck: Workplace Coordination
What makes Viven compelling is that it addresses a horizontal problem across all industries: the challenge of inter-team coordination and information handoffs.
- Unlike tools like Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise, which focus on individual productivity, Viven is designed to bridge collaboration gaps across entire organizations.
- According to Foundation Capital, Viven is “automating a function no one else is solving”—cross-team coordination when someone is unavailable.
This distinction could help Viven carve out a unique niche in the rapidly expanding enterprise AI market.
No Direct Competitors—Yet
While giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google offer AI with some personalization features, none currently offer individualized, secure digital twins for team-level collaboration.
- Viven’s early lead, combined with its pairwise privacy framework, could become its defensive moat.
- Ashutosh Garg even consulted with Vinod Khosla, who confirmed there were no existing players in this specific space—and promptly decided to invest.
“There’s this horizontal problem across all jobs of coordination and communication, which no one is automating,” said Garg.
Founders with Proven AI Pedigree
Viven is led by proven AI operators:
- Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia previously co-founded Eightfold, the $2.1B AI recruiting unicorn.
- Both have deep experience in machine learning, enterprise systems, and startup scaling.
- They continue to lead Eightfold while simultaneously building Viven, leveraging cross-domain experience in AI for workforce management.
Their credibility and vision have helped Viven attract top-tier investors and enterprise clients right out of the gate.
