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Tag: Eightfold

  • This Startup Says AI Clones of Your Employees Will Boost Productivity. Here’s How

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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. 

    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.

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    Ben Sherry

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  • Eightfold co-founders raise $35M for Viven, an AI digital twin startup for querying unavailable coworkers | TechCrunch

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    While employees spend much of their day communicating and coordinating amongst themselves on projects, this effort is often undermined by the availability of specific individuals. When a colleague with vital information is away — whether 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 — an AI recruiting startup last valued at $2.1 billion — believe that advances in LLMs and data privacy technologies can help solve some aspects of this costly problem. Earlier this year, they launched Viven, a digital twins startup with a mission to grant employees access to crucial information from teammates even when those colleagues are unavailable.

    On Wednesday, Viven emerged out of 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 related to common projects and shared knowledge.

    “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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He wasn’t sure that there were no competitors when he first started thinking about the idea. So he called Vinod Khosla to ask about it. The legendary investor assured Ashutosh Garg that nobody is doing this and agreed to invest.

    Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital was equally excited about Viven.

    “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 told TechCrunch.

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

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    Marina Temkin

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