The Directi and Zeta founder is betting his own cash, not venture money, that AI means workplace software has to be rebuilt from zero rather than patched with a chatbot.
Bhavin Turakhia has built and sold companies for nearly three decades, and he's never needed anyone else's money to start one. He founded Directi in 1998 with about $675 and eventually sold its web services arm to Endurance International Group for $160 million. He built Radix, a domain registry business now worth an estimated $500 million, and Titan, an email and productivity startup that took $30 million from Automattic in 2021 at a $300 million valuation. Now he's doing it again, this time putting $30 million of his own money into a new venture called Neo, an AI-native challenger to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, according to a report from TechCrunch.
Turakhia's bet is not that Microsoft and Google are too slow to add AI features. They aren't. Copilot is stitched through Word and Excel, Gemini through Docs and Sheets. His bet is narrower and more stubborn: that software designed for a world without AI can't simply be upgraded with a chat panel bolted onto the side. You have to start over. Neo combines documents, project management, and file storage with an assistant and agent layer called Friday, which connects to more than 1,000 external applications and is model-agnostic, meaning it can run on Anthropic's or OpenAI's systems rather than locking a customer into one provider.
That model-agnostic design is the clearest signal of what Turakhia thinks the actual fight is about. Microsoft owns a large stake in OpenAI and has built its entire AI office strategy around it. Google has done the same with Gemini. Neo's pitch to a business customer is that you shouldn't have to bet your whole company's software stack on a single lab's model staying ahead. Given how fast frontier models have leapfrogged each other over the past two years, that's a real argument, not just a marketing line.
Turakhia didn't go looking for a Series A. He's run this playbook before with Directi, Radix, and Titan, and the logic hasn't changed: self-funding means no board pushing him toward a launch date before the product is ready, and no investor deck forcing him to pick a single foundation model before he's sure which one will still be worth building on in a year. It also means slower, quieter growth. Neo employs about 45 people in Bengaluru, including 18 engineers, and the company expects to reach roughly 100 by the end of the year. That's a small team for a product meant to replace the tools that run most of the world's offices.
Neo isn't starting from a blank slate for customers, either. The company was ideated and launched internally in April 2026, and it's already running inside three of Turakhia's other companies: Zeta, Titan, and Radix. That gives Neo something most new productivity startups don't have on day one, real daily use inside operating businesses with actual headcount, before a single outside customer signs up. An external launch to select customers in India and the United States is planned for August 2026, with a public release set for January 2027.
The harder question is whether any of this matters to the businesses Microsoft and Google already have locked in. Switching an organization off Office or Workspace means retraining staff, migrating years of files, and rebuilding integrations that took months to set up the first time. That inertia is worth billions to the incumbents every year, and no amount of clever agent tooling makes a migration painless. Neo's initial targeting reflects that reality: it's going after knowledge workers at mid-sized technology, consulting, and professional services firms, the kind of organizations more likely to tolerate the friction of switching in exchange for tools built around how they actually work now.
Frankly, the odds favor the incumbents. Microsoft and Google aren't standing still, and lock-in is a real moat, not a talking point. But Turakhia has spent a career finding gaps that bigger, slower companies leave open, and he's willing to lose his own money finding out if this is one of them. Whether Neo becomes a genuine alternative or a well-funded experiment that stays inside his own portfolio companies should become clearer by January, when the rest of the world finally gets to use it.
Also read: Switch chases a $19 billion valuation as private money floods into AI data centers • Anthropic's Fable 5 Pricing Mess Is Handing Chinese Rivals an Opening • Base44 built its own AI model because generic chatbots make ugly apps
