AI startup raises $20m to build ‘digital twins’ of office workers
An AI startup that creates digital replicas of employees has raised $20m (£15m) as investors bet that technology used to model factories and machinery can be applied to office workers.
Twin1 AI emerged from “stealth” on Thursday after securing seed funding in a round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners and Aramco Ventures.
The San Mateo and London-based company creates an AI ‘twin’ of individual employees using information from their emails, meetings, documents and workplace software.
The software is designed to answer questions and carry out some tasks on an employee’s behalf, while connecting knowledge held across different parts of a business.
Twin1 said customers include law firms Linklaters, Orrick and Dechert, US lender Customers Bank and energy group Aegis Energy. It claims early customers have automated between 30 and 50 per cent of communications work, although the figure has not been independently verified.
The company will use the cash to expand its teams in London and California, develop its technology and increase sales.
Founded last year by Lewis Liu, Tom Cahn, Huiting Liu and Jonathan Budd, Twin1 is the latest company to try to bring the concept of digital twins into knowledge-based industries.
Digital twins have traditionally been virtual models of physical assets, allowing manufacturers and engineers to test changes or predict problems before making them in the real world. AI companies are increasingly experimenting with applying a similar idea to businesses and their workers.
Salesforce earlier this year outlined its own vision for an “enterprise digital twin”, which would model areas of a company to allow executives to test decisions and scenarios before putting them into practice.
Twin1 models on employees
Twin1 takes a different approach by building its system around individual employees rather than attempting to create a single replica of an entire company.
Its twins can draw information from workplace systems including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive and Sharepoint.
The company said employees control what information their twin can access and what can be shared with colleagues or other AI systems.
Liu, Twin1’s chief executive, said the aim was to “connect and amplify” employees’ knowledge rather than reduce it to generic AI output.
The funding round also included EJF Ventures, F-Prime, Lakestar, Notion Capital and Orrick, alongside a string of angel investors.
Several backers previously invested in Eigen Technologies, the AI document software company founded by members of the Twin1 team. Eigen was acquired by Sirion in 2024.