An artificial intelligence startup called Viven is pitching the idea of digital twins of enterprise employees that can aid in collaboration after raising $35 million in seed funding.

The round, announced today, was led by Khosla Ventures and saw participation from Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures, Operator Collective and a number of angel investors.

Viven, officially known as WisdomLabs.AI Inc., says its technology enables business employees to create highly personalized digital counterparts that not only share their knowledge, but can also make decisions on their behalf.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Viven co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ashutosh Garg said the startup is trying to tackle a very common problem in enterprises today, namely the delays caused by missing team members, who might be off sick or on vacation or otherwise preoccupied. Their absence can hinder the progress of their colleagues who are still at work, forcing them to wait until they receive a response.

But with Viven, they no longer need to wait. Instead, when someone needs to get an answer to a vitally important question, they can simply ask the relevant person’s digital twin to obtain the information they need.

Viven said its platform works by creating a customized large language model for each employee at a company, which serves as the foundation of that individual’s digital twin. It’s trained across that person’s real work, including things such as their emails, meeting notes and recordings, chat threads and other internal documents, so it knows everything they’re doing at the company. Armed with this knowledge, the digital twin can then respond to questions from colleagues regarding the projects they’re collaborating on.

“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 you need,” Garg told TechCrunch.

Besides filling in for employees who are off work, the twins can also help out in the longer term, preserving institutional memory if someone decides to quit the company and work somewhere else, the startup said. Viven’s technology also supports the creation of “team-level twins” that possess the combined knowledge of entire departments or teams. What this means is that a chief executive can quiz the AI twin of their global accounting team, for example, or a specific product group, and receive updates on their projects, without having to track down a specific individual.

How about privacy?

Garg admitted that there are significant challenges in creating digital twins of employees, because people are not going to want to share everything about their personal lives with an AI. There are also cases where employees might be handling sensitive work information that can’t be shared with their colleagues.

The startup solves this challenge by using a technique it has developed called “pairwise context and privacy,” which enables the underlying LLMs that power its digital twins to determine what information they can and cannot share with the person asking the questions. The LLMs will know which specific individuals at an organization are authorized to access a sensitive file, for example. In addition, they’re trained to understand when someone is asking about an employee’s personal life, and decline to provide any information.

To deter people from asking inappropriate questions, each employee will be able to see their digital twin’s full history of queries, as well as the persons making those queries, so they’ll know if someone is acting improperly.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Viven’s digital twins are part of a broader effort in AI agents to make task completion more autonomous and eliminate the involvement of humans in the process. “Human beings currently need to supervise AI agents, but the next step is full autonomy, with no humans involved,” he explained. “This is what Viven is essentially doing, and it opens a lot of questions and risks, and there could be serious repercussions, but it is the next logical step for agents.”

So far, Viven’s safeguards seem to be effective, for it has already gotten a lot of momentum even while operating in “stealth” mode prior to today’s announcement. Early adopters include the AI consulting firm Genpact Ltd., the web and application design firm RedCrackle Inc. and Garg’s previous startup Eightfold AI Inc.

Genpact President and CEO Balkrishan Kalra said he was so impressed with Viven’s technology that its digital twins have been deployed across its leadership teams. “Speed and agility are fundamental elements of our culture, making us natural partners for innovations like Viven’s Digital Twins, which gives our leadership team the organizational velocity to collaborate with clarity, speed and confidence,” he said.

Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said he’s backing Viven because time is one of the scarcest resources at any company. “By creating a digital twin for every employee, Viven gives organizations the ability to move faster and accelerate decision-making,” he said.

Image: Viven