Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable co-workers (techcrunch.com)

Eightfold co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia have launched Viven out of stealth with $35M in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures and others. Viven builds a specialized LLM “digital twin” for each employee by ingesting internal documents—email, Slack, Google Docs, etc.—so teammates can query an absent colleague’s twin for project-specific knowledge and decisions. The product is already in use at enterprises including Genpact and Eightfold, and the founders split time between the two companies while scaling the new startup. Technically, Viven’s differentiator is its privacy architecture: “pairwise context and privacy” aims to compute precisely what a requester can see depending on their relationship to the owner, combined with visibility into each twin’s query history as an audit/deterrent. That design addresses two big enterprise hurdles—sensitive data exposure and accountability—while enabling faster coordination and fewer blockers from unavailable experts. The approach implies per-user model instances, document ingestion pipelines, access-control logic, and audit logging; remaining challenges include hallucination mitigation, compliance, and long-term model maintenance. Viven positions this privacy-first pairwise model as its moat against broader personalization efforts from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI that could move into similar territory.