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Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a $30 million personal bet that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new venture, Neo<\/a>, is built on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the AI era cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots \u2014 it has to be redesigned from the ground up.<\/p>\n Turakhia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious enterprise technology bets. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded companies including Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, largely backing them with his own cash before bringing in outside investors. He\u2019s doing the same with Neo.<\/p>\n Turakhia told TechCrunch he is bootstrapping this much money because he believes AI marks a technology shift significant enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to build an iPhone, you can\u2019t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Turakhia argued 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 enterprises to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.<\/p>\n He\u2019s 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<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n Still, Turakhia\u2019s 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 every startup from the giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, to the productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman are racing to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflow.<\/p>\n Turakhia argued enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market, saying even a small share of global enterprise AI spending would represent a sizeable company.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that\u2019s larger than anything I\u2019ve built so far,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use across Turakhia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Turakhia said Neo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n