BENGALURU – Bhavin Turakhia has spent $30 million of his own money on a single assumption: that Microsoft Office is wrong. Not outdated. Not in need of a feature update. Wrong in a structural sense that makes it unsuitable for the era of AI, in a way no number of Copilot upgrades will fix. From a Bengaluru office with 45 employees, 18 of them engineers, he is building Neo, a work platform that treats artificial intelligence not as a layer added to document editing but as what office software should have been built around from the start, TechCrunch reported.
Neo combines project management, document creation, file storage, and AI in what the company describes as a model-agnostic architecture: enterprises can swap the underlying AI provider without rebuilding the tools that sit on top of it. The platform launched internally in April and is beginning its rollout to mid-sized companies in technology, consulting, and professional services. Turakhia says the product took roughly three months to build, a timeline he attributes to using AI in the development process itself. The $30 million is entirely personal. No venture capital firm has put money in.
“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,” Turakhia said in describing why he built Neo rather than extending an existing platform. The line carries a specific accusation. Microsoft has added Copilot across its 365 suite, embedding AI into Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook. Google has added Gemini to Workspace. Each of those additions layers AI onto interfaces designed for a world of manual document editing. Turakhia’s argument is that familiarity is the trap, that the wrong substrate, however well-improved, cannot become the right one.
The addressable market is not in doubt. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace together represent the software environment for hundreds of millions of knowledge workers globally. Salesforce, with its Agentforce platform, is pressing AI into business workflows from yet another angle. The competitors are enormous, well-capitalized, and deeply embedded in enterprise IT departments that spent years standardizing on their products. Turakhia’s argument is numerical: capturing 2 to 5 percent of the productivity software market would exceed the scale of every company he has previously built. The market is large enough that a single viable alternative can constitute a large business.
Turakhia, 46, has co-founded or launched Directi, Radix, Titan, and Zeta over the past two decades, all of them bootstrapped from personal capital before attracting outside investment or meaningful scale. None of them challenged category-defining American tech incumbents at the product layer. Directi operated domain registration and web hosting infrastructure. Radix manages top-level domains. Titan is an enterprise email platform. Zeta focuses on banking software. Neo is a different kind of bet, a direct challenge to the productivity stack that defines how knowledge workers operate globally, built from a team of 45 engineers in Bengaluru.
The structural problem is not the ambition. It is the timeline and the starting position. Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of employees and decades of enterprise relationships. Google has Workspace embedded in organizations from primary schools to governments. Neo has 45 people and a product that launched internally in April. Turakhia projects roughly 100 employees by year-end, with an emphasis on engineering and AI roles. That headcount trajectory, if maintained, produces a team still measuring in the hundreds when its competitors number in the hundreds of thousands.
Neo is built in Bengaluru, a fact with specific resonance in Indian tech. The city has defined India’s place in the global technology economy for two decades, as a destination for outsourced IT work, offshore development centers, and engineering capacity for the same multinational companies Turakhia is now competing against. Building a product company aimed at replacing the software those same companies make, from the city that helps them maintain and operate it, is a different kind of ambition than Bengaluru has previously been associated with at anything like this scale.
The timing puts Neo in direct conversation with how the incumbents are reading the same market signal. Microsoft’s $2.5 billion Frontier Company initiative, which will embed 6,000 engineers inside Fortune 500 clients to get AI actually working inside large organizations, reflects an acknowledgment that selling AI-enhanced licenses is not sufficient to drive real adoption. Microsoft is deploying thousands of people to solve the deployment problem that Neo is proposing to avoid by building software that does not have that deployment problem in the first place. They are different diagnoses of the same observation: that AI and legacy office software are not a natural fit.
What Neo has not yet produced is external validation. No venture capital firm has committed capital. No large enterprise client has been publicly announced. The $30 million is Turakhia’s own, and the proposition it is funding remains untested against the procurement cycles of the mid-sized technology and consulting firms Neo is targeting. What the next year will determine is whether the clean-room thesis holds when Neo’s product meets enterprise buyers whose purchasing decisions have been shaped by decades of Microsoft relationships, and whether Turakhia’s track record of building companies from personal capital can extend to a category as large and entrenched as office software. The bet is placed. The verdict is not.
