Indian tech entrepreneur Turakhia, 46, is bootstrapping $30 million of his own money to build Neo, an enterprise work platform designed as an AI-native alternative to Microsoft Office. Turakhia previously co-founded Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, and said he is funding Neo personally because he believes AI marks a shift significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch. "If you want to build an iPhone, you can't take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone," he told TechCrunch.
Neo combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product, and is designed ground-up for AI and to be model-agnostic, allowing enterprises to switch between AI providers rather than being tied to one. Turakhia said the goal is to make AI an active participant in day-to-day work rather than just another assistant employees turn to separately. The platform was launched internally in April and is currently in use across Turakhia's companies, including Zeta.
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to begin rolling out Neo to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers across technology, consulting, and professional services firms. Turakhia said the initial platform was built in three months, with AI extensively used in development — work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI. He acknowledged competition from Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce embedding AI across workplace software, as well as from labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, but argued enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market, noting that "even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that's larger than anything I've built so far."