Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is putting $30 million of his own money behind a bet that the world needs another enterprise AI company. According to TechCrunch AI, the 46-year-old is bootstrapping a new venture called Neo, an enterprise work platform built on one core idea: software designed before the AI era can’t just be bolted with a chatbot and called modern. It has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Turakhia knows the enterprise game. Over two decades he co-founded Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, usually funding them himself before bringing in outside investors. He’s running the same playbook with Neo, and his framing is blunt. “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 AI.
What Neo actually is
Neo launched internally in April and pulls several tools most companies keep separate into one product. Based on the TechCrunch AI report, it combines:
- Project management for tracking work
- Documents for writing and collaboration
- File storage for company assets
- AI woven directly into all of it
The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in daily work rather than a separate assistant employees switch to and back from. Two design choices stand out. Neo was built from the ground up for AI, and it’s model-agnostic, so enterprises can switch between AI models instead of getting locked into a single provider. That second point is a real differentiator. Vendor lock-in is one of the loudest complaints among enterprises buying AI right now.
Why he thinks incumbents are stuck
Turakhia’s core argument is structural. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are adding AI to products designed long before generative AI existed, and he believes that retrofit puts them at a disadvantage. A ground-up build, in his view, beats a patch.
He’s not the only investor thinking this way. TechCrunch AI notes that Chamath Palihapitiya first launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before raising a $135 million round this week. Self-funding first, then scaling, is becoming a familiar pattern among founders who want to prove the thesis before taking outside money.
The competitive reality
Here’s what makes this a genuine bet rather than a sure thing. Enterprise AI is one of the most crowded arenas in tech. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their workplace suites. The big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing in. Productivity players like Notion and Superhuman are racing to reshape daily workflows. Neo is walking into a fight against companies with distribution, budgets, and existing customer bases it doesn’t have.
Turakhia’s counter is that enterprise software has never been winner-takes-all. “Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said. Given global enterprise AI spend, even a sliver is a large company. That math is why he’s comfortable spending his own cash.
Availability and what’s next
Neo has been running internally across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta, for the past few months. According to TechCrunch AI, the plan is to roll it out to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, starting with knowledge workers at technology, consulting, and professional services firms. No public pricing has been shared yet.
One detail worth flagging for anyone tracking how AI changes software development itself: Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI used heavily throughout. He estimates the same work would have taken more than a year and a much larger team before generative AI. The Bengaluru startup runs on about 45 people today, including 18 engineers, and expects to reach roughly 100 by year’s end, with most hires focused on AI and software engineering.
The honest read is that Neo is a strong thesis with a hard road ahead. The rebuild-from-scratch argument is real, and model-agnostic design is smart positioning. Whether that’s enough to pull share from entrenched giants is the open question. Watch for the mid-market rollout in the coming months, where Neo’s claims meet paying customers. Full details are available at the original TechCrunch AI report.