Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is personally betting $30 million that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new business, Neois based on a simple principle: business software designed before the age of AI cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots: it must be redesigned from the ground up.
Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious corporate technology bets. Over the past two decades, he co-founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software company Zeta, backing them largely with his own cash flow before bringing in outside investors. He does the same thing with Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch that he was investing so much money because he believed AI marked a big enough technological shift to warrant rebuilding working software from scratch.
“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 workplace 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 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 businesses to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single vendor.
He’s not the only one who thinks this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding firm 8090 with his own capital before raise a funding round of $135 million this week.
Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has become one of the most competitive areas of technology. Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are integrating AI into their business software. Meanwhile, startups everywhere, from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, are working to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflow.
Turakhia argued that enterprise software has never been a win-win market, saying that even a small share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a sizable undertaking.
“Even if we end up with a 2 to 5 percent market share, that’s more than anything I’ve built so far,” he said.
Over the past few months, Neo has been used internally at Turakhia companies, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to mid-sized 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, with AI used extensively in the development process. He estimates the work 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 it plans to reach around 100 employees by the end of the year, with most of the new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
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Jagmeet covers startups, technology policy updates and all other major technology developments in India for TechCrunch. He previously worked as a senior correspondent at NDTV.
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