Indian technology entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a personal $30 million wager that the next generation of enterprise software will not come from adding artificial intelligence to legacy workplace applications, but from rebuilding them from the ground up.
Turakhia, the founder of new enterprise AI startup Neo, is self-funding the venture, arguing that the generative AI revolution represents a fundamental technological shift that requires an entirely new approach to workplace productivity software rather than incremental upgrades to existing platforms.
The investment adds to a growing wave of entrepreneurs and investors betting that AI-native software companies can still carve out significant market share despite fierce competition from established technology giants including Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.
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Turakhia is no stranger to backing ambitious technology ventures with his own capital. Over the past two decades, the 46-year-old entrepreneur has co-founded several successful companies, including Directi, Radix, Titan, and digital banking software provider Zeta, typically financing them himself before seeking outside investors.
He is following the same strategy with Neo.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Turakhia said he is personally financing the company because he believes artificial intelligence represents a once-in-a-generation platform shift comparable to the transition from feature phones to smartphones.
“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.
That philosophy forms the foundation of Neo.
Launched internally in April, the Bengaluru-based company has developed an AI-native enterprise work platform that combines project management, document creation, file storage and artificial intelligence into a unified system designed to make AI an active participant in everyday business operations rather than a standalone assistant employees consult separately.
Instead of treating AI as an add-on feature, Neo embeds intelligence directly into workplace workflows, allowing employees to collaborate with AI continuously as they manage projects, create documents and organize information.
Turakhia believes most incumbent software providers face a structural disadvantage because their products were designed long before the emergence of generative AI. According to him, integrating AI into legacy software often results in fragmented user experiences where chatbots are layered on top of existing applications rather than deeply integrated into how work is performed.
Neo, by contrast, was designed from inception around AI capabilities.
The platform is also model-agnostic, allowing enterprise customers to choose among multiple large language models instead of being locked into a single AI provider. That flexibility could become increasingly valuable as businesses seek to balance performance, cost, data privacy and regulatory requirements while rapidly evolving AI models compete for market share.
Across Silicon Valley and global technology markets, several founders have begun personally financing AI ventures before seeking institutional investment, rather than relying exclusively on external funding. One recent example is venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who initially self-funded enterprise AI coding startup 8090 before the company secured a $135 million funding round this week.
The broader market opportunity is substantial.
Enterprise AI has become one of the fastest-growing segments of the software industry as organizations seek to automate workflows, improve employee productivity and reduce operating costs. Thus, major technology companies are investing aggressively to defend their positions.
Microsoft continues expanding AI capabilities across Microsoft 365 through Copilot, Google is integrating Gemini into Workspace, and Salesforce has embedded AI agents throughout its customer relationship management platform.
Meanwhile, AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Notion, Superhuman and numerous startups are competing to redefine how businesses create content, manage knowledge and collaborate.
Despite the crowded competitive landscape, Turakhia believes there is ample room for new entrants. He notes that enterprise software has historically supported multiple successful vendors rather than evolving into winner-takes-all markets.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far.”
That assessment emerges from the enormous scale of global enterprise software spending, which analysts expect to expand significantly as businesses accelerate AI adoption over the remainder of the decade.
For several months, Neo has been operating internally across Turakhia’s portfolio companies, including digital banking software firm Zeta, allowing engineers to refine the platform before commercial deployment. The company plans to begin rolling out the software to mid-sized enterprises in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge-intensive sectors such as technology, consulting and professional services, where employees spend significant amounts of time creating documents, managing projects and collaborating across teams.
Turakhia also credits AI with dramatically accelerating Neo’s own development process. According to him, the company’s initial platform was completed in just three months, with engineers extensively using AI throughout software development.
He estimates that building the same product before the arrival of generative AI would have required more than a year and a substantially larger engineering team.
The startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers, and plans to expand its workforce to roughly 100 employees by the end of the year. Most of the planned hiring will focus on artificial intelligence research and software engineering as Neo prepares for commercial rollout.