Bhavin Turakhia‘s Neo platform is the latest $30 million argument that workplace software needs to be torn down and rebuilt for the AI era, not merely patched with a chatbot bolted on the side.
Turakhia, 46, is bootstrapping the new venture entirely from his own pocket. The logic, he told TechCrunch, is that generative AI represents a shift big enough to justify starting from scratch rather than layering features onto legacy architecture. ‘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.
It is the kind of line that lands well in a keynote. Whether it lands in enterprise procurement meetings is the harder question.
What Bhavin Turakhia’s Neo Platform Actually Does
Launched internally in April, Neo bundles project management, documents, spreadsheets, diagrams, file storage, AI assistants, autonomous agents, and real-time collaboration into a single product, according to YourStory. The pitch is that AI is baked into the workflow rather than sitting alongside it as a separate tool employees have to remember to consult.
Turakhia also argues Neo is model-agnostic, letting enterprises switch between AI models rather than being locked into a single provider’s stack. That is a pointed dig at the approach taken by Microsoft and Google, both of which are weaving their own AI models deep into their productivity suites.
Neo has been running in internal use across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta, his banking software business. The plan is to begin rolling it out to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, with an initial focus on knowledge workers in technology, consulting, and professional services.
A Founder with a Pattern of Backing Himself
Turakhia has form here. Over two decades he co-founded Directi, Radix, Titan, and Zeta, funding most of them personally before bringing in outside investors. Business Standard has described Zeta, which Turakhia co-founded with Ramki Gaddipati in 2015, as targeting a share of the $300 billion global banking software market. The Zeta website describes him as a ‘serial entrepreneur and billionaire’ with a track record across five businesses over 22 years.
Neo follows the same self-funding template. Turakhia said the initial platform was built in three months, with AI used extensively throughout development: work he estimates would have taken more than a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI existed. The Bengaluru-based startup currently has about 18 engineers and expects to reach around 45 employees by the end of the year, with most new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
He is not the only investor-class figure putting personal capital into enterprise AI before seeking outside money. Chamath Palihapitiya launched 8090 Labs in January 2024 with his own cash, positioning it as an AI coding agent for corporate programming teams. He subsequently raised a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, and others, and has taken on the CEO role, his first full-time operating position since leaving Facebook.
8090 describes its product as a ‘software factory’: a governed multiplayer platform where people and AI agents build and change enterprise software together. Different category from Neo, but the same underlying thesis: enterprise software designed in a previous era needs to be rebuilt, not renovated.
The competitive context around both bets is not gentle. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their existing workplace tools, with distribution advantages that no 18-person startup can match on day one. Anthropic, OpenAI, Notion, and Superhuman are all reshaping how businesses use AI in daily work, each with meaningful funding behind them.
Turakhia’s counter-argument is structural rather than competitive: enterprise software has never produced a single winner, so a small share of a large market is still a substantial business. ‘Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,’ he said. Whether the market is inclined to hand out that 2% to a product still in internal testing is the part the slide deck tends to skip.
The real test arrives when Neo moves beyond Turakhia’s own companies and into procurement conversations with organisations that already pay for Microsoft 365. That rollout, currently pencilled in for the coming months, is where the Nokia-to-iPhone analogy will either earn its place or quietly retire.
