Twin1 AI Inc. launched today with $20 million in seed funding to build artificial intelligence-powered digital twins that carry an individual professional’s expertise across their organization.

The San Mateo, California-based startup pairs each worker with a persistent model of their own knowledge, judgment and working context, one that can answer questions and act on that person’s behalf. Twin1 was founded in 2025 by Lewis Liu, Tom Cahn, Huiting Liu and Jonathan Budd (pictured) and also runs a team in London.

Three of the four founders came out of Eigen Technologies Ltd., the London document AI company that sold to SirionLabs Inc. in 2024 after raising more than $80 million. Lewis Liu, Twin1’s chief executive, co-founded Eigen and led it through that sale.

A twin draws on its users’ email, meeting records, documents and connected workplace systems, and it works inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive and SharePoint. Permissions run through the user, who sets which of those sources the twin reads and which colleagues are allowed to query it.

That last part is the pitch. Twin1 layers six sets of rules-based and AI-based controls over both peer-to-peer and peer-to-AI exchanges, blending corporate policy, inherited permissions and human sign-off so that a twin surfaces information only where the requester is already entitled to it.

Above the individual twins sits the Twin Network, a coordination layer through which twins locate the right colleague, collect permission-aware knowledge and hand work between teams. The company also offers an enterprise Model Context Protocol server, letting other agents and enterprise applications pull governed context from one twin or from the network.

Twin1 has been running with customers in legal, financial services and energy for more than a year rather than arriving cold. Named users include Linklaters LLP, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Dechert LLP, Customers Bank and Aegis Energy. The company says those customers report the platform handling 30% to 50% of the communications work their knowledge workers would otherwise do themselves.

“In every knowledge organization, the human is the atomic unit of knowledge,” Liu said in the funding announcement. He argued that most enterprise AI averages out what individual employees know and said Twin1 was built to keep that expertise attached to the person who has it.

Orrick Chief Innovation Officer Wendy Butler Curtis said the platform lets the firm mine its collective data and called it “one of the most exciting developments in the practice today.” Orrick also took a strategic stake in the round.

Bessemer Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners and Aramco Ventures co-led the seed round. EJF Ventures, Tin Alley Ventures, AGI House Ventures, Neo, F-Prime Capital, Btech Consortium, Antiportfolio Ventures, Lakestar and Notion Capital also invested, alongside angels including Wiz Inc. co-founder Roy Reznik, Notable Capital Managing Partner Hans Tung and Dawn Capital co-founder Haakon Overli. Several of them backed Eigen.

The money goes to hiring in San Mateo and London, sales and marketing, and further work on the platform. Liu told Artificial Lawyer that Twin1 is working through a pipeline of more than 400 prospects and plans to follow the enterprise product with a self-service version aimed at smaller firms and individual professionals.

Photo: Twin1 AI