Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a personal bet of $30 million that there is still room for another AI venture. His new venture, Neoit’s based on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the age of artificial intelligence can’t just be upgraded with chatbots — it has to be redesigned from the ground up.
Turahia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious tech business bets. Over the past two decades, he co-founded companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software firm Zeta, backing them largely with his own cash before bringing in outside investors. He does the same with Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch that he is raising so much money because he believes AI marks a technological shift significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from the ground up.
“If you want to make an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow turn it into an iPhone,” he said.
Released internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage and artificial intelligence into a single product. The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in everyday work, rather than just another assistant that employees turn to individually.
Turakhia argued that most incumbents face a structural disadvantage when adding AI to products designed before AI was created. Neo, he said, was designed from the ground up for AI and is model-agnostic, allowing businesses to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.
He is not alone in thinking this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially started the AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before raising a $135 million funding round this week.
However, Turakhia’s bet comes as business artificial intelligence has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in tech. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are incorporating AI into all of their workplace software. Meanwhile, every startup from lab giants like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman are scrambling to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflow.
Turakhia argued that enterprise software has never been a market that takes all the money, saying that even a small share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a significant company.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s bigger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
In recent months, Neo has been in internal use at 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 firms.
Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI used extensively in the development process, work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger team of engineers before AI was built.
The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that it expects to grow to about 100 employees by the end of the year, with most of the new hires focused on artificial intelligence and software engineering.
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