Indian serial entrepreneur Babin Turakia is making a $30 million personal bet that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new venture, Neo, is built on a simple premise. Workplace software designed before the AI era cannot simply be upgraded with chatbots and will need to be redesigned from the ground up.
Mr. Turakia, 46, is no stranger to ambitious bets on enterprise technology. Over the past 20 years, he has co-founded companies such as Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software company Zeta, and backed them primarily with his own money before bringing in outside investors. Neo does the same thing.
Turakia told TechCrunch that he is raising this amount of money himself because he believes AI represents a significant enough change in technology to justify rebuilding workplace software from scratch.
“If you want to make an iPhone, you can’t take Nokia parts and turn them into an iPhone in some way,” he says.
Launched internally in April of this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI in one product. The goal, Turakia said, is to make AI an active participant in daily work, rather than just an assistant that employees rely on individually.
Turakia argued that most incumbent companies face structural disadvantages when adding AI to products that were designed before generative AI was introduced. He said Neo was designed from the ground up for AI and is model agnostic, allowing companies to switch between AI models without being tied to a single provider.
He’s not alone in thinking this way. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially bootstrapped enterprise AI coding venture 8090, which went on to raise a $135 million funding round this week.
Still, with enterprise AI emerging as one of the most competitive areas in technology, Turakia is taking a gamble. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI across their workplace software. Meanwhile, startups ranging from research giants like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman are racing to reshape the way companies use AI in their daily workflows.
Turakia argued that enterprise software is by no means a winner-take-all market, noting that even a small percentage of global enterprise AI spending represents a significant number of companies.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, that’s bigger than what I’ve built so far,” he said.
For the past few months, Neo has been used internally across Turakia’s enterprises, including Zeta. The company plans to begin rolling out its software to midsize businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers at technology, consulting, and professional services companies.
Turakia said Neo’s initial platform was built in three months and AI was used extensively in the development process, but he estimates that before generative AI, it would have required a much larger engineering team and the work would have taken more than a year.
The Bangalore-based startup currently employs around 45 people, including 18 engineers. Turakia told TechCrunch that the company expects the number of employees to grow to about 100 by the end of the year, with most of the new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
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