Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a substantial personal investment of $30 million (approximately £23.5 million) into his latest venture, Neo, an enterprise AI company designed to challenge the dominance of established workplace software providers. Turakhia, 46, believes that existing platforms, developed before the advent of generative AI, cannot simply be augmented with chatbots but require a complete redesign from the ground up to fully leverage AI's potential.
Neo, which commenced internal operations in April 2026, is an integrated enterprise work platform that combines project management, document creation, file storage, and advanced AI capabilities into a singular product. Turakhia's vision is for AI to be an intrinsic, active component of daily workflows, rather than a separate tool employees resort to. He argues that incumbent software providers face a structural disadvantage when attempting to embed AI into their legacy systems, whereas Neo was built with AI as its foundational principle and is model-agnostic, offering businesses flexibility in their choice of AI models.
This significant personal investment underscores Turakhia's conviction in the transformative power of AI. He has a history of backing his ventures, including Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, with his own capital before seeking external investors. Turakhia highlighted to TechCrunch that he perceives AI as a technological shift profound enough to warrant rebuilding workplace software from scratch, likening it to the impossibility of transforming a Nokia into an iPhone using its original parts.
The market for enterprise AI is becoming increasingly competitive, with tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce rapidly integrating AI across their extensive software suites. Concurrently, numerous startups, from large AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity-focused companies such as Notion and Superhuman, are all striving to redefine how businesses utilise AI. Despite this crowded landscape, Turakhia maintains that the enterprise software market has never been a winner-takes-all scenario, suggesting that even a modest share of global enterprise AI spending could result in a substantial company.
Neo has been in use across Turakhia's existing companies, including Zeta, for several months. The Bengaluru-based startup, currently employing around 45 people, including 18 engineers, plans to begin rolling out its software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months. The initial target sectors include knowledge workers within technology, consulting, and professional services firms. The company expects to expand its workforce to approximately 100 employees by the end of 2026, with a primary focus on recruiting AI and software engineering talent.