Indian tech tycoon bets $30M of his own money to build AI alternative to Microsoft Office

Indian entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia has committed $30 million of his own money to launch Neo, a startup aiming to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Office and Google's productivity suite with tools built natively around artificial intelligence rather than bolted onto existing software.

The company's founding argument is that office software conceived long before generative AI existed cannot be meaningfully modernized by simply layering a chatbot on top. Turakhia contends the entire architecture of workplace tools needs to be reconceived from the ground up to take full advantage of what AI can do, rather than treating it as an add-on feature to legacy programs.

Neo marks the fifth company the 46-year-old has founded, continuing a pattern of enterprise-focused ventures that stretches back roughly twenty years. His earlier ventures include Directi, an internet services group, along with Radix and Titan, and he also helped start Zeta, a company that builds software for banks. Across that run, Turakhia has typically funded new ideas out of his own pocket before eventually opening them up to outside investors, and Neo follows that same playbook.

In comments to TechCrunch, Turakhia explained that the scale of his personal investment reflects how significant he believes the AI transition to be. In his view, the shift is substantial enough that it justifies starting workplace software over from scratch instead of retrofitting decades-old programs with newer capabilities.

The bet places Neo directly against two of the most entrenched franchises in enterprise technology. Microsoft Office and Google's workplace apps have dominated document creation, spreadsheets, and collaboration tools for years, giving both companies vast troves of user data and enterprise relationships that any newcomer would need to overcome. Both incumbents have also been racing to add their own AI features, including Microsoft's Copilot integrations, meaning Neo will need to differentiate itself against well-funded rivals rather than entering an open field.

Turakhia's willingness to self-finance at this scale sets Neo apart from many AI startups that lean heavily on venture capital from the outset, giving him more control over the company's direction in its early stages. That approach carries its own risks, however, since the entrepreneur is shouldering the financial exposure directly rather than spreading it across institutional backers, at least until outside funding is eventually brought in as it was for his previous companies.

Whether a ground-up rebuild can outpace incumbents that are rapidly retrofitting their own products with AI remains an open question, and Neo has not detailed a product launch timeline or specified which workplace functions it intends to tackle first. Turakhia's history of building and exiting enterprise software companies gives the effort credibility, but success will likely hinge on how quickly Neo can demonstrate capabilities that established players cannot simply replicate through updates of their own.

Source: TechCrunch