Indian Tech Tycoon Bets $30M of His Own Money to Build AI Alternative to Microsoft Office

Bhavin Turakhia, a serial Indian entrepreneur, is making a $30 million personal bet on Neo, a new venture that builds AI-native workplace software. At 46, Turakhia has co-founded companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, often self-funding them before seeking outside investors. Neo, launched internally in April, combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single platform. Turakhia argues that workplace software designed before generative AI cannot be retrofitted with chatbots—it needs a complete redesign. "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.

Neo is model-agnostic, allowing enterprises to switch between AI models. Turakhia believes incumbent players face structural disadvantages when adding AI to legacy products. He is not alone in this thinking: investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially funded enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital, before raising a $135 million round this week. The enterprise AI space is highly competitive, with Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce embedding AI into their suites, and startups like Anthropic, OpenAI, Notion, and Superhuman also racing to transform workflows.

Turakhia contends that enterprise software is not a winner-takes-all market; even a 2–5% market share would be larger than anything he has built before. Neo has been deployed internally across his companies, including Zeta, and will soon roll out to mid-sized businesses, targeting knowledge workers in technology, consulting, and professional services. The initial platform was built in three months using AI extensively—a process Turakhia estimates would have taken over a year with a much larger team pre-generative AI. The Bengaluru-based startup currently has 18 engineers and plans to grow to 45 employees by year-end, focusing on AI and software engineering roles.