Saudi Aramco’s venture capital arm has co-led a $20 million seed investment in Twin1 AI, a California-based enterprise technology startup developing AI-powered digital representations of professional workers.
The financing was jointly led by Aramco Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Tribeca Venture Partners. The startup disclosed the investment as it emerged from stealth on August 20.
Twin1 said it will use the capital to expand its teams in San Mateo, California, and London, support its commercial operations and continue developing its technology.
Aramco Backs Enterprise AI Platform
Aramco Ventures’ involvement brings the investment arm of one of the world’s largest energy companies into a funding round focused on enterprise knowledge and workplace automation.
Additional participants included EJF Ventures, Tin Alley Ventures, AGI House Ventures, Neo, F-Prime, Btech Consortium, Antiportfolio Ventures, Lakestar, Notion Capital and Insiders. Law firm Orrick made a strategic investment, while several individual investors also joined the round.
Daniel Carter, managing director of Aramco Ventures US, said: “Serving the world's largest and most highly regulated enterprises requires far more than checking the standard security and compliance boxes. The Twin1 team of repeat founders combines a deep understanding of how these organizations operate and their AI governance needs with the experience required to make AI work in the enterprise.”
Digital Twins Built Around Individual Workers
Twin1’s product creates what the company calls a digital twin of an individual professional. Rather than serving as a general-purpose workplace chatbot, the system is intended to reflect a user’s knowledge, working context, communication preferences and judgment. It draws context from authorized workplace sources such as emails, meetings and documents.
The digital twins operate through commonly used business platforms, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive and SharePoint. Depending on the permissions granted, a twin can answer questions, draft communications and help coordinate work across an organization. Twin1 says users retain control over which information the software can access and how that information may be shared.
Privacy and governance sit at the center of the company’s pitch to regulated sectors. Twin1 says its platform combines inherited access permissions, company policies, AI-based controls and human approvals. It also offers software-as-a-service, single-tenant and private-cloud deployment options. Those features could be particularly relevant to banks, law firms and energy companies, where confidential information cannot be freely pooled into an unrestricted AI system.
Early Deployment Spans Regulated Industries
Twin1 was founded in 2025 by Lewis Z. Liu, Tom Cahn, Huiting Liu and Jonathan Budd. Liu, Cahn and Huiting Liu previously worked together at document intelligence company Eigen Technologies, while Budd’s background includes work on information retrieval and encrypted storage systems. Bessemer Venture Partners said it had known members of the team since their time at Eigen.
The startup reports that its technology has been deployed for more than a year across legal services, financial services and energy. Organizations identified by Twin1 as users include law firms Linklaters, Orrick and Dechert, Customers Bank and Aegis Energy. These relationships are named by the company, but details such as contract values, deployment sizes and revenue contribution have not been disclosed.
Customers have reported that the platform automates between 30% and 50% of communications work performed by knowledge workers.
Funding Targets Growth and Product Development
A central challenge facing enterprise AI providers is not simply generating answers, but determining which systems and records an AI tool should be allowed to consult. Twin1 is attempting to address that problem at the level of the individual employee, with each digital twin governed by the permissions and preferences attached to the person it represents.
Bessemer partner Elliott Robinson said: "Enterprise knowledge has become increasingly fragmented, creating real friction in how organizations access and use expertise. Twin1 AI is building an individual-first context layer that allows users to extend their knowledge across teams and systems. We believe this represents an important shift in how AI can be applied to knowledge work while preserving control and ownership."
Twin1 now faces the task of converting early deployments into a broader commercial business while demonstrating that its privacy controls work under real enterprise conditions. The $20 million round gives the startup additional resources to hire, develop its platform and pursue customers.
