Serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia has pledged $30 million of his own capital to launch an AI‑focused enterprise company. His new venture, Neo, is founded on a clear concept: legacy workplace tools built for a pre‑AI world cannot be salvaged with mere chatbot overlays; they must be reengineered from scratch.
At 46, Turakhia is no stranger to bold enterprise‑technology initiatives. Over the last 20 years he has co‑founded firms such as Directi, Radix, Titan, and Zeta—a banking‑software provider—mostly financing them with personal funds before seeking external investors. He is applying the same model to Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch that he is self‑funding the entire amount because he views AI as a transformative shift that demands a complete overhaul of workplace software.
“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.
Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product. The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in day‑to‑day work rather than just another assistant employees turn to separately.
Turakhia argued most incumbents face a structural disadvantage when retrofitting AI onto products designed before the generative‑AI era. Neo, he said, was designed from the ground up for AI and is model‑agnostic, allowing enterprises to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.
He’s not alone in thinking this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before raising a $135 million funding round this week.
Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their workplace software. Meanwhile, startups ranging from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity firms such as Notion and Superhuman are racing to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflow.
Turakhia argued enterprise software has never been a winner‑takes‑all market, saying even a modest share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a sizable company.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
For the past few months, Neo has been used internally across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to mid‑sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers across technology, consulting, and professional services firms.
Turakhia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI extensively used 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 about 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that it expects to grow to around 100 employees by the end of the year, with most new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
