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 still prefers the risk he can control. He founded Directi in 1998 with about $675 and later sold its web services business to Endurance International Group for $160 million. He built Radix, a domain registry business now valued at about $500 million, and Titan, the email and productivity startup that raised $30 million from Automattic in 2021 at a $300 million valuation. Now he is putting $30 million of his own money into Neo, an AI-native challenger to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, according to a report from TechCrunch.
That is the story here. Not another startup promising to make your documents slightly smarter. Turakhia is saying the basic shape of office software is wrong for an AI era, and that Word, Excel, Docs, Sheets and the rest cannot be fixed by adding a chat panel on the side.
Microsoft and Google are not asleep. Copilot is already stitched through Word and Excel, while Gemini is being pushed across Docs, Sheets and Gmail. You can argue about how useful those tools are in daily work, but you cannot argue that the incumbents have ignored AI. Turakhia's bet is narrower: software designed before AI agents existed will keep carrying old assumptions, even when the buttons look new.
Neo combines documents, project management and file storage with an assistant and agent layer called Friday. TechCrunch reported that Friday connects to more than 1,000 outside applications and is model-agnostic, so it can run on systems from OpenAI, Anthropic or another provider rather than forcing a company to pick one AI lab for the whole stack.
That model choice is not a small detail. Microsoft has built much of its office AI strategy around OpenAI. Google has Gemini. Neo's pitch to a business customer is that you should not have to bet your company's daily workflow on one model provider staying ahead. Given how quickly frontier models have traded the lead since 2023, that is a real argument, not a slogan.
Turakhia also did not go looking for a Series A. He has run this playbook before with Directi, Radix and Titan, and the logic is plain enough: self-funding means no board pushing him toward a launch date before the product is ready, and no investor deck forcing him to pretend the AI stack has already settled. It also means the company has to move carefully. Neo has about 45 employees in Bengaluru, including 18 engineers, and expects to reach about 100 by the end of the year. That is a small team for a product trying to replace the tools that run most offices.
Neo is not being built in a vacuum. The company was ideated and launched internally in April 2026, and it is already running inside three of Turakhia's other businesses: Zeta, Titan and Radix. That gives it something most new productivity startups lack on day one, daily use inside operating companies with real staff, real files and real workflows. 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 difficult part is not building a better document editor. It is persuading companies to leave the software they already use every hour. Switching off Office or Workspace means retraining staff, moving years of files and rebuilding integrations that took months to get right the first time. That inertia is worth billions to Microsoft and Google. Frankly, no agent demo makes migration painless.
Neo's early targeting shows Turakhia knows that. It is going after knowledge workers at mid-sized technology, consulting and professional services firms, the sort of companies more likely to tolerate switching pain if the tools actually fit how their teams now work. A bank with 80,000 employees is not going first. A 400-person software services firm might.
The odds still favor the incumbents. Microsoft and Google have distribution, budgets and administrative lock-in that most startups never get close to touching. But Turakhia has spent a career finding useful gaps in markets bigger companies thought they already owned, and this time he is willing to spend his own $30 million to test one. You will know more by January 2027, when Neo is supposed to move from internal proof to public product.
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
