Serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is placing a personal $30 million wager that the enterprise AI landscape still has space for a new contender. His latest venture, Neo, operates on a straightforward belief: workplace software created before the era of generative AI can't be retrofitted with chatbots—it needs a complete rethinking from scratch. At 46, Turakhia is accustomed to taking bold risks in enterprise tech. Over the last twenty years, he has co-founded companies like Directi, Radix, Titan, and banking software firm Zeta, typically funding them himself initially before seeking outside investors. He's following the same playbook with Neo. "If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone," he explained.

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Launched internally this past April, Neo is an enterprise work platform that merges project management, document handling, file storage, and artificial intelligence into one unified product. Turakhia's vision is to make AI an active collaborator in everyday tasks, not just a separate tool employees turn to on the side. He argues that most established players face a fundamental handicap when trying to layer AI onto products built before generative AI became mainstream. Neo, he says, was engineered specifically for the AI era and remains model-agnostic, giving enterprises the flexibility to switch between different AI models instead of being locked into a single provider.

He's not the only one thinking along these lines. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya recently launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 using his own capital, before raising a $135 million funding round this week. However, Turakhia's bet comes at a time when enterprise AI has become one of the most fiercely competitive sectors in technology. Giants like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their workplace suites. Meanwhile, a wave of startups—from major labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman—are racing to transform how businesses integrate AI into their daily workflows.

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Turakhia contends that enterprise software has never been a winner-takes-all market. He points out that capturing even a small slice of global enterprise AI spending could yield a substantial business. "Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s larger than anything I’ve built so far," he noted. For the past several months, Neo has been used internally across Turakhia's companies, including Zeta. The startup plans to start rolling out the software to mid-sized businesses in the coming months, initially focusing on knowledge workers in technology, consulting, and professional services firms.

Turakhia says Neo's initial platform was built in just three months, with heavy use of AI during the development process—work he estimates would have taken over a year with a much larger engineering team before generative AI came along. The Bengaluru-based startup currently employs around 18 engineers.