Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is investing $30 million of his own money to build Neo, a new company he says is redesigned from the ground up for the AI era rather than being an add‑on to legacy workplace software.
Turakhia, 46, has co‑founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan and the banking software firm Zeta over the past two decades, and has frequently used his own capital to seed those ventures before bringing in external investors. He is following the same playbook with Neo by personally backing the initial funding.
Turakhia told TechCrunch he views generative AI as a technology shift deep enough to justify rebuilding workplace tools. “If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,” he said.
What Neo offers
Launched internally in April, Neo is an enterprise work platform that integrates project management, documents, file storage and AI into one product. Turakhia’s stated aim is to make AI an active participant in everyday work rather than a separate assistant workers consult.
Neo was designed from the start to be AI‑first and is model‑agnostic, allowing customers to switch between AI models instead of being locked to a single provider. Turakhia argues many incumbent vendors have a structural disadvantage when retrofitting generative AI into products built before the technology existed.
Competitive context
Enterprise AI has quickly become a fiercely competitive area: Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are infusing AI into workplace software, while AI labs and productivity startups from Anthropic and OpenAI to Notion and Superhuman race to reshape business workflows.
Turakhia contends that enterprise software markets have not historically been winner‑takes‑all, and even a relatively small slice of global enterprise AI spending would yield a substantial company. “Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
Adoption, development and growth plans
Neo has been used internally across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta, for the past few months. The company plans to roll the software out to mid‑sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers in technology, consulting and professional services.
Turakhia says Neo’s initial platform was built in three months and that AI was used extensively during development — work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI.
The Bengaluru‑based startup currently employs about 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch he expects headcount to grow to around 100 by the end of the year, with most new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
Why it matters
Neo represents both a significant personal wager by an experienced founder and a test of whether AI‑native, model‑agnostic workplace platforms can carve out a durable position in a market crowded with well‑capitalized incumbents and ambitious startups. The coming public rollout and hiring push will be key indicators of whether Neo can win customers and scale.
