Bhavin Turakhia is making a large personal wager on a familiar but still unsettled question: what should workplace software look like when AI is built into the product from the start?
His new company, Neo, is being funded with $30 million of his own money. The premise is direct: software created before the generative AI era may not be transformed simply by adding chatbot features on top.
A founder-backed push into enterprise AI
Turakhia, 46, has a long record of building enterprise technology companies. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software firm Zeta. In several of those efforts, he used his own capital before later bringing in outside investors.
Neo follows that same pattern. Turakhia told TechCrunch that he is bootstrapping the company at this level because he sees AI as a technology shift big enough to require a fresh start for work software.
“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.
That comparison captures the central argument behind Neo. Turakhia is not presenting AI as a feature layer for an existing office suite. He is framing it as a reason to rethink the structure of the software itself.
What Neo is trying to combine
Neo launched internally in April this year. It is described as an enterprise work platform that brings project management, documents, file storage and AI into one product.
The stated goal is to make AI part of daily work rather than a separate assistant that employees consult outside their main workflow. In practical terms, that means Neo is being positioned around the work objects and routines businesses already rely on: projects, files and documents.
The source article identifies several core pieces of the platform:
- project management for coordinating work
- documents for creating and managing business content
- file storage for organizing work assets
- AI woven into the platform rather than treated as a separate add-on
Turakhia also says Neo is model-agnostic. That means enterprises would not have to depend on only one AI model provider inside the product. Instead, they could switch between AI models.
For companies evaluating enterprise AI software, that flexibility may matter because AI models and business needs can change. The argument behind Neo is that a platform designed around AI from day one can make those choices part of the architecture, instead of forcing them into software built for an earlier era.
A crowded market with big incumbents
Neo is entering one of the most competitive parts of the technology industry. Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are already adding AI throughout their workplace software. At the same time, major AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI, along with productivity companies such as Notion and Superhuman, are trying to shape how companies use AI in daily workflows.
That makes Turakhia’s bet both ambitious and risky. The market is not waiting for a new entrant. Established platforms already have customers, workflows and distribution. Startups, meanwhile, are moving quickly to build AI-native tools for specific work tasks.
Turakhia’s counterpoint is that enterprise software has not historically behaved like a winner-takes-all market. He argues that a limited slice of global enterprise AI spending could still support a large business.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
That view helps explain why Neo does not need to replace every incumbent platform to matter. Its opportunity, as described by Turakhia, is to win enough customers who want workplace software rebuilt around AI rather than upgraded around it.
Internal use before outside rollout
Neo has been used internally across Turakhia’s companies for the past few months, including Zeta. The company plans to start rolling out the software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months.
The first target customers are knowledge workers in technology, consulting and professional services firms. Those groups are likely to rely heavily on documents, projects, files and cross-functional coordination, which matches the areas Neo is trying to bring together.
Turakhia said Neo’s first platform was built in three months with extensive use of AI during development. He estimates that similar work would previously have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI.
The Bengaluru-based startup currently has about 45 employees, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that Neo expects to grow to around 100 employees by the end of the year, with most hiring focused on AI and software engineering.
The larger question for AI work tools
Neo’s bet reflects a broader debate in enterprise technology. One path is to add AI features into the workplace products companies already use. Another is to rebuild the work platform so AI is part of the foundation.
Turakhia is clearly choosing the second path. Whether businesses follow will depend on whether Neo can turn that architecture into a product that is useful enough to justify changing how teams work.
For now, Neo is a founder-funded attempt to prove that the future of enterprise AI software is not just smarter chat inside old tools. It is a bet that the office platform itself needs to be redesigned.