Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia has personally bet $30 million that there is still room for other enterprise AI companies. His new venture, Neo, is built on the simple premise that business software designed before the AI era cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots and must be redesigned from scratch.
Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious corporate technology investments. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software company Zeta, backing them mostly with his own cash before attracting outside investors. He’s doing the same thing to Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch that he’s bootstrapping this much money because he believes AI is a technology change significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.
“If you want to make an iPhone, you can’t just take parts from Nokia and somehow turn them into an iPhone,” he said.
Neo, launched internally in April of this year, is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into one product. Turakhia’s goal is to make AI an active part of everyday work, rather than just being used separately by other assistants.
Turakhia argued that most established companies face structural disadvantages when adding AI to products designed before generative AI. He said Neo was designed from the ground up for AI and is model agnostic, allowing businesses to switch between AI models without being tied to a single provider.
He is not the only one who thinks this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before raising $135 million in funding this week.
Still, 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 large research labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman are racing to change the way companies use AI in their daily workflows.
Turakhia argued that enterprise software is by no means a winner-takes-all market, and said that even a small portion of global enterprise AI spending would represent larger companies.
“Even if we end up with a 2 to 5 percent market share, that’s more than I’ve ever built,” he said.
Over the past few months, Neo has been used internally across the Turakhia company, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to midsize 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 extensive use of AI during development. Before generative AI, we estimate that with a much larger engineering team, the task would have taken more than a year.
The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch that the company expects to have about 100 employees by the end of this year, with most of the new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
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