While employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating with each other on projects, this effort is often compromised by the availability of specific individuals. When a colleague with vital information is away, on vacation, or in a different time zone, the rest of the team must delay progress until that person responds.

Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the co-founders of Eightfold, the latest AI recruiting startup worth $2.1 billion — believe that advances in LLM and data privacy technologies can help solve some aspects of this costly problem. They were launched earlier this year Livena digital twin startup with a mission to ensure employees have access to crucial information about teammates even when those colleagues are unavailable.

On Wednesday, Viven emerged from stealth mode with $35 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures and others.

Viven develops a specialized LLM for each employee, effectively creating a digital twin by accessing their internal electronic documents such as email, Slack and Google Docs. Other employees in the organization can then query that person’s digital twin to get immediate answers regarding common projects and shared knowledge.

“When each person has a digital twin, you can just talk to their twin as if you were talking to that person and get the answer,” Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch.

One of the biggest obstacles is that people can’t share everything with everyone who asks. Employees often handle sensitive information or have personal files that they want to keep private from the rest of the team.

According to Ashutosh Garg, Viven’s technology solves this complex problem through a concept known as pairwise context and privacy. This allows the startup’s LLMs to determine precisely what information can be shared and with whom within the organization.

Viven LLMs are smart enough to recognize personal context and know what information should remain private, such as questions related to an employee’s personal life. But perhaps the most important safeguard is that everyone can see their digital twin’s query history, which acts as a deterrent against people asking inappropriate questions.

“It’s a very difficult problem to solve and until recently was unsolvable,” Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, told TechCrunch.

Viven is already used by several enterprise customers, including Genpact and Eightfold. (Co-founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia continue to lead Eightfold, splitting their time between the company and running Viven.)

As for competition, Ashutosh Garg says no other company is tackling digital twins for the enterprise yet.

He wasn’t sure there were no competitors when he started thinking about the idea. So he called Vinod Khosla to inquire. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that no one is doing this and agreed to invest.

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally enthusiastic about Viven.

“When Ashutosh came to me and described the product, the most important thing for me was: There is this horizontal problem in all coordination and communication work, that none of it is automated,” Ashu Garg told TechCrunch.

But just because there are no direct competitors now doesn’t mean other companies won’t build digital twins for businesses in the future. Ashu Garg said Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s enterprise search products have a personalization component. But, if they were to enter this market, Viven hopes that its “paired” context technology will provide its moat.