Eightfold Co-Founders Raise $35M for Viven, an AI Digital Twin to Query Unavailable Co-Workers

The co-founders of talent-technology firm Eightfold have raised $35 million to launch Viven, a startup building AI-powered “digital twins” designed to answer questions on behalf of unavailable co-workers. The raise underscores growing investor appetite for workplace AI agents that combine large language models (LLMs), knowledge graphs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to surface institutional knowledge in real time.

What Viven Does

Viven aims to create individual digital profiles that can be queried when subject-matter experts are offline, on leave or otherwise inaccessible. These digital twins are intended to synthesize an employee’s public and consented professional artifacts—documents, emails, calendars, code repositories, and recorded meetings—into a searchable knowledge representation. When queried, the system leverages vector embeddings and context-aware retrieval to craft answers that reflect the person’s documented expertise and previous communications.

Technically, Viven is expected to combine off-the-shelf and custom LLMs with vector databases, fine-tuning layers and business logic that constrain replies to verified sources. The approach mirrors a broader enterprise trend: merging RAG pipelines with structured knowledge graphs to improve factuality and traceability while reducing hallucinations common to generic LLM outputs.

Security, Privacy and Compliance Considerations

Startups building digital twins face immediate legal and ethical hurdles. Viven’s value proposition depends on accessing sensitive internal data, which raises questions about consent, data minimization, retention policies and regulatory compliance. Enterprises will require granular access controls, audit logs, and mechanisms to revoke consent or restrict a twin’s knowledge scope.

To address auditability, some vendors explore cryptographic techniques or blockchain-based metadata ledgers to create immutable provenance trails for model outputs and data access. Analysts note that while blockchain can add tamper-evident logs, it is not a silver bullet for privacy or regulatory compliance; encryption, differential privacy and strong identity and access management remain central.

Market Dynamics and Funding Use

The $35 million infusion will likely fund model development, data ingestion tooling, enterprise integrations and cloud compute. For digital twin startups, compute spend and talent—particularly engineers with experience in LLMs, vector search and security—drive early burn rates. The raise signals investor confidence in productivity-enhancing enterprise AI despite a backdrop of cooling valuations in some parts of the startup ecosystem.

Competition is emerging from multiple angles: SaaS incumbents adding AI assistants, specialist knowledge management startups, and enterprise AI service providers. Viven’s edge will depend on demonstrable accuracy, strong governance features, and the ability to integrate with common workplace systems without introducing new compliance risk.

Geopolitics and Infrastructure Constraints

Broader geopolitical forces also shape this market. AI compute capacity, supply chains for hardware accelerators, and export controls on high-end chips influence where and how startups can scale. Data residency laws and cross-border privacy rules mean enterprises in Europe, the U.K., and other jurisdictions may demand on-premise or regionally isolated deployments—factors that affect deployment architecture and cost.

Outlook

Viven arrives at a moment when organizations are eager to capture institutional knowledge and reduce operational friction. If it can deliver accurate, auditable responses while respecting consent and regulatory rules, digital twins could become standard workplace infrastructure. However, success will depend on solving technical reliability, privacy, and governance challenges—areas that will define winners in the next wave of enterprise AI.

As regulators enact stricter transparency and safety requirements for AI, startups like Viven will need to balance innovation with robust controls. The $35 million raise gives Viven runway to prove its architecture and enterprise-fit; the broader test will be whether organizations entrust AI with representing their experts without risking misinformation, data leakage or compliance breaches.