Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are integrating AI into their office suites. Bhavin Turakhia says that approach will fail. Turakhia contends that attaching AI chatbots to legacy software is not enough; the entire system must be re-architected for AI from the ground up.
For comparison, a similar enterprise AI coding venture called 8090, started by investor Chamath Palihapitiya, raised $135 million in a funding round this week.
Turakhia has a track record. He co-founded Directi, Radix, Titan, and Zeta - a banking software firm where Neo has been tested internally. Turakhia's previous ventures have achieved significant scale; for instance, Zeta recently reached a valuation of over $1 billion, and Neo was tested inside that company before its public launch, giving the product a real-world proving ground.
He is betting that the new platform can win a slice of the global enterprise AI market. Even 2% to 5% of that market, he says, would make Neo larger than anything he has built before.
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"If you want to build an iPhone, you can't take the parts of a Nokia and somehow convert it into an iPhone," Turakhia said. That is his core argument. Older companies like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce built their products long before AI existed.
Adding a chatbot on top does not change the underlying design. According to Turakhia, older companies are structurally at a disadvantage when trying to layer AI onto software built before generative AI emerged.
Neo is different. It was designed for AI from day one.
It competes not only with Microsoft and Google but also with newer tools like Notion and Superhuman. The big AI labs - Anthropic and OpenAI - are shaping the technology that powers all these products. Turakhia believes that only software built from scratch for AI can fully take advantage of it.
Within the coming months, Neo will start deploying its platform to mid-market companies. For Turakhia, this is a bet that the future of work belongs to software designed for AI from the ground up.
Turakhia's entrepreneurial journey began with Directi, a web services company that grew to serve millions worldwide. He later founded Radix, a domain registry operator, and Titan, a fintech firm. His most recent success, Zeta, achieved unicorn status in banking software. This track record gives him credibility in scaling technology platforms, and Neo's internal testing at Zeta provided real-world validation before its public launch.
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