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

Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia made a personal bet of $30 million that there is still room for another business AI company. His new business, Neo, is built on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the AI ​​era can’t simply be upgraded with chatbots – it has to be redesigned from the ground up.

Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to business technology bets. Over the past two decades, he has founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan, and the banking software Zeta, mostly backing it with his own money before bringing in outside investors. He did the same to Neo.

Turakhia told TechCrunch that he’s spending this much money because he believes AI marks a technological shift significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.

“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take Nokia parts and somehow turn it into an iPhone,” he said.

Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise workflow platform that combines project management, documentation, file storage, and AI into one product. The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in everyday work rather than just one of the assistants workers turn to separately.

Turakhia said that most stakeholders face structural inaccuracies when adding AI to products designed before manufacturing AI. Neo, he said, was designed from the ground up in AI and is model-agnostic, allowing businesses to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.

He is not the only one who thinks this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya first launched AI coding business 8090 with his own capital before raising $135 million in funding this week.

Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as business AI has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI into all of their workplace software. Meanwhile all the startups from big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to manufacturing companies like Notion and Superhuman are racing to shape the way businesses use AI in their daily workflows.

Turakhia said that enterprise software has never been a winning market, saying that even a small share of global enterprise spending on AI can represent a large company.

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

For the past few months, Neo has been used internally by all Turakhia companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to midsize businesses in the coming months, initially targeting information workers across technology, consulting, and professional services firms.

Turakhia said Neo’s first platform was built in three months, with AI heavily used in the development process, a task he estimated would take more than a year with a very large engineering team before producing AI.

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