Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a $30 million personal bet that there may be still room for some other enterprise AI company. His new venture, Neo, is built on a simple premise: Workplace software program designed before the AI technology can’t truly be upgraded with chatbots — it needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
Turakhia, 46, no stranger to ambitious enterprise technology bets. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded companies which include Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software program organization Zeta, in large part backing them with his own coins before bringing in outdoor investors. He’s doing the same with Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch he’s bootstrapping this a lot money due to the fact he believes AI marks a technology shift major 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 transform it into an iPhone,” he stated.
Released internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that integrates project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product. The goal, Turakhia stated, is to make AI an active participant in day-to-day work instead of just another assistant employees turn to separately.
Turakhia claimed most incumbents face a structural disadvantage whilst adding AI to products formed earlier than generative AI. Neo, he stated, was designed from the ground up for AI and is model-agnostic, permitting enterprises to switch between AI models instead of being tied yo a single provider.
He’s not alone in thinking this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya at first with released enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with own capital earlier than raising a $135 million funding round this week.
Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has evolved into one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are integrating AI across their workplace software. Meanwhile every startup, from the giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to the productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, are racing to reshape how businesses use AI of their daily workflow.
Turakhia claimed enterprise software had never been a winner-takes-all marketplace, pronouncing even a small share of global enterprise AI spending could represent a substantial company.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s large than anything I’ve built so far,” he stated.
For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use across Turakhia’s companies, which include Zeta. The company plans to start introducing the software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, to start with focused on knowledge workers across technology, consulting, and professional services firms.
Turakhia stated Neo’s initial platform was built in 3-months, with AI broadly used in the development process, work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI.
The Bengaluru-based totally startup recently employs about 45 people, inclusive of 18 engineers. Turakhia informed TechCrunch that it anticipates to boost to around 100 employees by the end of the year, with most latest hires focused on AI and software engineering.
