Serial Indian entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is personally investing $30 million into his latest venture, Neo, confident that there remains significant potential for a new player in the enterprise AI sector. His core belief is that existing workplace software, predating the AI revolution, cannot simply be augmented with chatbots but fundamentally requires a complete redesign from the ground up.
At 46, Turakhia is renowned for his ambitious enterprise technology investments. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded and largely self-funded successful companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan, and the banking software firm Zeta, typically bringing in external investors only after establishing a strong foundation. He is replicating this strategy with Neo.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Turakhia explained his decision to bootstrap such a substantial amount, stating his conviction that artificial intelligence represents a technological paradigm shift profound enough to warrant a complete overhaul of workplace software.
He articulated this necessity with an analogy: “If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone.”
Internally launched in April, Neo functions as a comprehensive enterprise work platform, seamlessly integrating project management, document creation, file storage, and advanced AI capabilities into a singular product. Turakhia emphasizes that the objective is to position AI as an active, integral participant in daily operations, rather than merely an auxiliary tool employees access separately.
Turakhia contends that most established players face inherent structural disadvantages when attempting to integrate AI into products originally conceived before the advent of generative AI. Neo, conversely, was meticulously engineered from its inception with AI at its core and is designed to be model-agnostic, providing enterprises the flexibility to interchange AI models rather than being confined to a single provider.
This strategic perspective is not unique. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya similarly initiated his enterprise AI coding venture, 8090, with personal capital before successfully securing a $135 million funding round just this week.
Nevertheless, Turakhia’s substantial commitment is made amidst an intensely competitive landscape, as enterprise AI has rapidly emerged as one of the most contested domains in technology. Industry titans like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are aggressively embedding AI throughout their workplace software suites. Concurrently, a multitude of startups, ranging from major AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity-focused companies like Notion and Superhuman, are all racing to redefine how businesses leverage AI in their daily workflows.
Turakhia, however, posits that the enterprise software market has historically not been a winner-takes-all scenario. He argues that even a modest share of the global enterprise AI spending would translate into a significantly sized company.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he stated.
For the past several months, Neo has been in active internal deployment across Turakhia’s existing companies, including Zeta. The company is now preparing to commence the rollout of its software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers within technology, consulting, and various professional services firms.
Turakhia revealed that Neo’s initial platform was developed in a remarkably swift three months, a feat largely attributed to the extensive use of AI throughout the development process. He estimates that this same undertaking would have demanded over a year and a significantly larger engineering team in the pre-generative AI era.
The Bengaluru-based startup currently operates with a team of approximately 18 engineers. Turakhia informed TechCrunch that the company anticipates expanding its workforce to around 45 employees by the close of the year, with the majority of new hires concentrating on AI and software engineering roles.
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