A serial entrepreneur who co-built some of India’s largest internet businesses has put $30 million of his own money into a bet that most enterprise software is due for replacement, not renovation.

Bhavin Turakhia, whose previous ventures include Directi and Flock, launched Neo publicly on July 1, 2026. Neo is an AI-native enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI agents into a single product. It targets mid-sized businesses in technology, consulting, and professional services, and positions itself directly against Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.

The premise is deliberately provocative: you cannot turn legacy software into an AI tool. You have to start over.

“If you want to build an iPhone, you can’t take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone,” Turakhia told TechCrunch. The comparison is pointed. Microsoft has spent years bolting Copilot onto Word, Excel, and Teams. Turakhia’s argument is that this produces a fundamentally worse product than something architected for AI from the beginning.

What Neo Actually Does

Neo is built around agents, not applications. Instead of opening a document editor and then switching to a task manager and then switching to a chat tool, Neo’s approach puts an AI agent at the center of every workflow. Users describe what they need, and the platform organises work across its integrated components.

The platform is also model-agnostic. Enterprises can swap the underlying AI model, which means they are not locked into any single AI provider’s pricing or capability roadmap. That is a meaningful design choice in 2026, when AI costs and model quality are both moving fast and unpredictably.

What 45 People Can Build in 3 Months

The most striking detail in Neo’s launch is the team size. Forty-five people, eighteen of them engineers, built the initial platform in approximately three months. Turakhia estimates that the same work would have required a much larger team and more than a year before generative AI existed.

That is the broader point underneath this launch. The ability to build fast and small has fundamentally shifted. A company that would once have needed a hundred engineers and two years to challenge Microsoft’s productivity suite can now show up in a quarter with a credible alternative.

This changes how you should think about competitive moats in software. Incumbents that assumed their engineering head-start was a lasting advantage are going to be surprised by what small, focused teams can ship.

The Target Market Tells You Something

Neo is not going after everyone. It is starting with knowledge workers in technology, consulting, and professional services: people who use productivity software hard and who have high tolerance for switching tools if something genuinely works better.

That is a deliberate land-and-expand strategy. If Neo can win the most demanding, software-literate users, they provide credible proof points for the broader market. It is the same path Slack used to break into enterprise communication a decade ago.

Neo plans to roll out to mid-sized businesses in the coming months. At 45 people, the company is not trying to land the Fortune 500 on day one. It is building a product reference it can use to raise the funding that follows real traction.

What This Means for Business

Your current productivity stack is under review, whether you initiated it or not. Microsoft and Google are both investing heavily in AI features for their existing tools. But a growing number of startups are making the case that retrofitted AI is always going to be worse than AI-native design.

For businesses, this raises a few real questions:

The switching cost calculation has changed. Legacy productivity tools carry huge switching costs in training, habit, and data. Those costs have always made it hard for challengers to get traction. But AI-native tools can onboard faster and integrate existing data better than their predecessors, which means the friction is lower than it was.

Model-agnostic design matters more than most people realise. The enterprise software market is currently being reshaped by AI pricing volatility. Companies that lock you into one model are exposing you to vendor concentration risk. The fact that Neo was built to be model-agnostic from the start is a feature that matters in 2026.

The engineering team that built Neo in three months will be someone else’s team next year. If your business is still assuming that large-budget, slow-moving software vendors hold every advantage, that assumption is worth revisiting.

The practical implication for most businesses is not to cancel Microsoft Office today. It is to watch what happens when AI-native tools start showing up in your market and take the evaluation seriously when they do. Turakhia’s bet is that the people who designed Office for a world of mouse-clicks and file systems have a harder problem than it looks when the interface shifts to conversation and agents.

Who Is Bhavin Turakhia

Turakhia is not a first-time founder. He co-founded Directi, a web services company that grew into a large, bootstrapped business before being sold in parts for over a billion dollars. He later built Flock, a team messaging app that competed with Slack in the Indian market, and Ringo, a voice and messaging platform.

He is investing his own capital in Neo, not taking venture money for the initial build. The $30 million is a personal bet, which tells you something about conviction. Founders who write their own cheques tend to be making a different kind of argument than founders who spend investors’ money.

Whether Neo displaces Microsoft is not the interesting question at this stage. The interesting question is how many teams like Neo’s are currently building, and how long it takes before one of them lands in your category with a product that is genuinely better by design rather than feature count.

The answer, based on what AI has done to development timelines, is probably sooner than most incumbents are planning for.