The Bhavin Turakhia Neo AI platform launched internally in April, and it rests on a pointed argument: software built before the generative AI era cannot be retrofitted into something genuinely intelligent. It has to be thrown out and rebuilt.
Turakhia, the 46-year-old Indian serial entrepreneur behind companies including Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, is putting $30 million of his own money behind that argument. The new venture, Neo, is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product, bootstrapped entirely on personal capital before any outside investors are brought in.
‘If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,’ Turakhia told TechCrunch.
What the Bhavin Turakhia Neo AI Suite Actually Contains
Neo is not a single application but a suite of four named products. According to Business Standard, those are Friday, an AI assistant, co-worker and agent layer connected to more than 1,000 external applications; Tasket, a project management platform; Studio, a knowledge management platform covering documents, spreadsheets, and diagrams; and Drive, a file-sharing workspace where people and AI agents work together on files.
The architecture is also model-agnostic, meaning enterprises can switch between AI providers rather than being locked into a single one. Turakhia’s stated goal is to make AI an active participant in daily work, not a bolt-on assistant employees consult separately.
Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, with AI used extensively in development. Turakhia estimates the same build would have taken more than a year with a much larger pre-AI engineering team. The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs around 18 engineers and expects to grow to around 45 employees by the end of the year, with most new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
The platform has been in internal use across Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta, for the past few months. The company plans to roll out the software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers in technology, consulting, and professional services.
A Pattern of Personal Capital, From Zeta to Neo
Turakhia’s willingness to lead with his own money has precedent. He co-founded Zeta alongside Ramki Gaddipati in April 2015, backing it personally before bringing in outside capital. The banking software firm became a unicorn in 2021 after receiving a $250 million investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, lifting its valuation to $1.45 billion; it had previously been valued at $300 million, according to YourStory.
Neo follows the same playbook: personal capital first, outside investors later. Turakhia argued to TechCrunch that AI represents a technology shift large enough to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch rather than layering AI onto existing product architectures.
He is not the only entrepreneur making a similar calculation. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya seeded his AI coding venture 8090 with his own capital before closing a $135 million Series A this week. That round was led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, David Friedberg of The Production Board, and Jason Calacanis of Launch, among others, according to TechCrunch. The 8090 platform, called Software Factory, is described as a governed multiplayer environment for building and changing enterprise software with coordinated AI agents under human oversight, and the company runs an enterprise delivery business across healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, government, and financial services, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
The comparison matters because it illustrates a particular thesis gaining traction among entrepreneurs who have built scaled technology companies: that the correct response to generative AI is not integration but replacement.
Turakhia acknowledged the competitive pressure. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their existing workplace software, and productivity companies from Notion to Superhuman are reshaping business workflows. His counter is that enterprise software has historically not been a winner-takes-all market.
‘Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far,’ he said.
The rollout to paying customers in the coming months will be the first real test of whether that market thesis holds against the incumbents.
