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Have you ever needed to ask a colleague an important question, only to find out they’re out of the office all week? What if you didn’t have to wait, and could instead just ask a digital double of them? That’s the idea behind Viven, a new startup that aims to create “digital twins” of your coworkers and employees by analyzing their emails, documents, messages, and meetings. Viven is the latest company from Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia, the cofounders of AI-powered recruiting and hiring startup Eightfold. Garg (Viven’s CEO) and Kacholis (the CTO) have spent decades building recommendation engines and personalization algorithms at Google, IBM, and most recently, Eightfold. But no algorithm could solve the problem that kept appearing in their work: the disappearing expertise of departing employees. “When people leave a company,” says Garg, “all their knowledge and experience goes away with them.” Their solution? Build “digital twins” of employees, preserving their institutional knowledge in the form of an always-on ChatGPT-like interface. They began developing the technology earlier this year, using sources like email, Slack, and Google Docs as training data to create an interactive persona based on your coworkers or even yourself. The company has raised $35 million in seed funding from investors including Khosla Ventures. Garg says he uses his own digital twin as a brainstorming partner, and for drafting responses to investor emails, prepping for customer meetings, and summarizing customer escalations. But users can also message their coworkers’ digital twins to get information when the real person is on vacation, leaves the company, or is otherwise unavailable. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation Obviously, this leads to several privacy questions. Could an AI twin accidentally reveal sensitive information, like that a coworker has been complaining about their boss in private DMs? According to Garg, Veiven includes privacy settings at both the admin and individual user level. As a user, you can determine who has access to your digital twin, and get specific about the kind of information the clone will share with specific people. In addition, Garg says, anyone with a digital twin will have access to their own twin’s chat history. Beyond digital twins of people, Garg says that Viven customers will also be able to make twins for specific teams, projects, and accounts. Kacholia says that Viven has “augmented” the work done by today’s top AI model providers (like OpenAI and Anthropic) so that workers can “understand every individual’s knowledge, their skills, their strengths, their way of thinking.” When an employee with a digital twin leaves a company, Garg says, “you can filter out all your personal stuff, all the private stuff, and then the enterprise can set the appropriate retention policy.” After a specified amount of time, that digital twin is deleted. Garg and Kacholia are still running Eightfold while building Viven, but they say the energy feels different. “Every time you come out of stealth mode, the energy that it creates is just so exciting,” Garg says, “you feel like it’s day zero again. In my 18 years of entrepreneurship, I have never seen more excitement than now.” Digital twins have been part of the AI revolution for years. Some founders, including beehiiv founder Tyler Denk, have developed their own AI-powered digital twins through a platform called Delphi. Google has even published research into what happens when a digital twin outlives their human counterpart.
