Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a personal $30 million bet that there’s still room for another AI business venture. Your new adventure, Neois based on a simple premise: work software designed before the age of AI cannot simply be updated with chatbots: it must be redesigned from the ground up.
Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious business technology bets. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software firm Zeta, largely backing them with his own money before bringing in outside investors. He’s doing the same thing with Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch that he is raising so much money because he believes AI marks a significant enough technological shift to justify rebuilding workplace software from the ground up.
“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take parts from a Nokia and somehow turn them into an iPhone,” he said.
Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage and artificial intelligence in a single product. The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in daily work rather than just another assistant that employees turn to separately.
Turakhia argued that most incumbents face a structural disadvantage when adding AI to products designed before generative AI. Neo, he said, was designed from the ground up for AI and is model agnostic, allowing companies to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single vendor.
He is not the only one who thinks this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding company 8090 with his own capital. raise a $135 million financing round this week.
Still, Turakhia’s bet comes at a time when enterprise AI has become one of the most competitive areas of technology. Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are incorporating AI into their work software. Meanwhile, all the startups, from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, are racing to reshape the way companies use AI in their daily workflow.
Turakhia argued that enterprise software has never been a winner-take-all market, and stated that even a small portion of global enterprise spending on AI would represent a considerable undertaking.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s more than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use across all Turakhia companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to midsize businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers at technology, consulting and professional services companies.
Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, and that AI was used extensively 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 startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that he expects to grow to around 100 employees by the end of the year, and that most of the new hires will focus on artificial intelligence and software engineering.
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