Serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia launched Neo, an AI-native work platform, earlier this month, committing $30 million of his own capital to the venture — his largest personal bet since co-founding fintech unicorn Zeta. Neo unifies project management, document editing, file storage, and AI execution into a single connected workspace, built specifically to make AI “a first-class participant in every workflow, not a tab beside it,” in Turakhia’s words.
Turakhia’s core argument is structural: legacy office software from Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce was designed before generative AI existed, and layering chatbots on top cannot fully capture what AI-native design allows. “If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,” Turakhia told TechCrunch
Neo was built in three months by a team of 18 engineers and has been in internal use across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta, before its public rollout. The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs about 45 people and expects to grow to roughly 100 by year-end, with new hires concentrated in AI and software engineering. It plans to begin deploying to mid-market companies in technology, consulting and professional services in the coming months, competing not just with incumbent office suites but with newer tools like Notion and Superhuman.
Turakhia has spent more than two decades building technology companies, including Directi, whose web businesses were acquired for $160 million in 2014; domain registry operator Radix; fintech firm Titan, valued at $300 million following investment from Automattic; and Zeta, the SoftBank-backed banking software company now valued at roughly $2 billion. He has historically bootstrapped his ventures with personal capital before bringing in outside investors, and is following the same approach with Neo.
Turakhia said enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market, arguing that even a modest slice of global enterprise AI spending would represent a company larger than anything he has built so far. Neo enters a crowded field — investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s enterprise AI coding venture 8090 raised $135 million in the same week Neo became public, underscoring how competitive the space has become even for well-capitalised founders.
