The Indian tech mogul is betting $30 million of his own money to build an artificial intelligence replacement for Microsoft Office

Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is betting $30 million that there is still room to create another AI company. His new venture, Neo, is built on a simple premise: Workplace software designed before the age of AI can’t simply be upgraded with chatbots — it must 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 company Zeta, backing them largely with his own money before attracting outside investors. He does the same thing with Neo.

Turakhia told TechCrunch that he’s seeding that kind of money because he believes AI represents a big enough technological shift to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.

“If you want to make an iPhone, you can’t just take parts of a Nokia phone and somehow turn it into an iPhone,” he said.

Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise workflow platform that combines project and document management, file storage, and artificial intelligence into a single product. The goal is to make AI an active participant in daily work rather than just another assistant that employees turn to separately, Turakhia said.

Most incumbent companies face a structural disadvantage when adding AI to products designed before generative AI, Turakhia said. He said Neo 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 is not alone in thinking this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI developer 8090 with his own capital before raising a $135 million funding round this week.

However, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI emerges as one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are integrating AI into their workplace software. Meanwhile, every startup, from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, is racing to reshape how companies use AI in their daily workflows.

Enterprise software has never been a winner-take-all market, Turakhia said, saying even a small share of global enterprise spending on AI would represent a big business.

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

For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use across Turakhia companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the program to medium-sized companies in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers across technology, consulting and professional services companies.

Turakhia said the initial Neo platform was built in three months, with artificial intelligence used extensively in the development process, and estimates that the work would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI.

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