Bhavin Turakhia launches AI-native Neo to challenge Microsoft, Google

Bhavin Turakhia launched Neo on Wednesday, backing the AI-native enterprise work platform with $30 million of his own capital as he moved against Microsoft and Google’s grip on workplace software. The platform is built on the premise that software built before the AI era cannot be patched with chatbots alone, because the whole stack has to be rebuilt for human and machine work to happen together.

Neo combines project management, documents, file storage and AI in one product, with an assistant and agent layer called Friday that connects to more than 1,000 external applications. The platform is model-agnostic and designed to work with frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI. The product is aimed at knowledge workers, IT companies and SaaS companies, and it can be adopted by small teams of 10 to 15 employees or by individual workers looking for a productivity lift.

The company was ideated in April 2026 and launched internally that same month. It is already running inside three of Turakhia’s other companies, Zeta, Titan and Radix. Neo plans an external launch in August 2026 for select customers in India and the United States, followed by a public release in January 2027.

He co-founded Directi in 1998 with his brother Divyank Turakhia, sold Directi’s web services businesses to Endurance International Group in 2014 for $160 million, and later built Radix, Flock, Titan and Zeta. Zeta, founded in 2015 with Ramki Gaddipati, became a unicorn in 2021 and was valued at $2 billion after a 2025 funding round.

Neo’s scale is still modest by the standards of the incumbents it wants to displace. The company has about 45 to 50 employees, including roughly 18 engineers, and plans to reach about 100 people by the end of 2026. Turakhia said he will split his time between Zeta and Neo, and he told TechCrunch that even 2% to 5% market share would be larger than anything he has built before.