Indian tech tycoon bets $30M of his own money to build AI alternative to Microsoft Office
Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a $30 million personal bet that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new venture
Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a $30 million personal bet that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new venture, Neo, is built on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the AI era cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots — it has to be redesigned from the ground up. Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious enterprise technology bets. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, largely backing them with his own cash before bringing in outside investors. He’s doing the same with Neo. Turakhia told TechCrunch he is bootstrapping this much money because he believes AI marks a technology shift significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.
“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,” he said. Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product. The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in day-to-day work rather than just another assistant employees turn to separately. Turakhia argued most incumbents face a structural disadvantage when adding AI to products designed before generative AI. Neo, he said, was designed from the ground up for AI and is model-agnostic, allowing enterprises to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider. He’s not alone in thinking this way.
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before raising a $135 million funding round this week. Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their workplace software. Meanwhile every startup from the giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to the productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman are racing to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflow. Turakhia argued enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market, saying even a small share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a sizeable company. “Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers across technology, consulting, and professional services firms. Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI extensively used in the development process, work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI. The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs about 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that it expects to grow to around 100 employees by the end of the year, with most new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
The BriefWire