Indian tech tycoon bets $30M of his own money to build AI alternative to Microsoft Office

Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is personally betting that there is still room for a new AI company. His new venture, Neois built on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the AI ​​era cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots; it needs to be redesigned from the ground up.

Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious corporate technology bets. Over the past two decades he has co-founded companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software company Zeta, backing them largely with his own money before bringing in outside investors. He does the same with Neo.

Turakhia told TechCrunch that he’s raising so much money because he believes AI marks a technological shift big enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from the ground up.

“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t somehow convert the parts of a Nokia 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 daily work, rather than just another assistant worker to whom it turns separately.

Turakhia argued that 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 companies to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.

He’s not the only one who thinks this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched the AI ​​Coding 8090 venture with his own capital before raising a $135 million funding round this week.

Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has become one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are integrating AI into their workplace software. Meanwhile, all the startups, from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, are reshaping the way companies use AI in their daily workflow.

Turakhia argued that enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market, saying that even a small share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a large company.

“Even if we end up with 2 to 5% market share, that’s bigger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.

In recent months, Neo has been used internally at Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta. The company plans to roll out the software to mid-market companies in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers in technology, consulting and professional services firms.

Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI being used extensively in the development process. According to estimates, Neo’s work with a much larger engineering team would have taken more than a year before generative AI.

The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that it expects to grow to about 100 employees by the end of the year, with most of the new hires focused on AI and software engineering.