Bhavin Turakhia bets $30M of his own on Neo, an Office rival

Bhavin Turakhia has committed $30 million of his own money to build Neo, an AI productivity suite that aims to compete head on with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. The striking part is not just the ambition but where the money comes from: there is no venture capital round behind it, this is the founder's personal capital, according to TechCrunch.

Neo is Turakhia's fifth venture. He is an Indian entrepreneur with a long track record in enterprise software, from domains and hosting to corporate email. That background explains why he is now taking on one of the most dominated and hardest markets to contest: office productivity.

What Neo proposes

Neo's bet is to build the work tools (documents, spreadsheets, email, calendar) around AI from the start, rather than bolting an assistant on top of a product that already exists. It is the difference between designing a house with the wiring planned in and running the cables afterwards along the walls. Microsoft and Google have mostly taken the second path: Copilot and Gemini have been added to suites that were born decades ago.

The move makes sense on paper. If text generation and summarization, data analysis in a spreadsheet or drafting emails become assisted tasks by default, whoever starts from scratch can design the workflow without dragging along the accumulated complexity of Office or Workspace. The problem, as always in this market, is not technical but one of distribution and habit.

Why competing here is hard

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace do not compete on features alone. They compete on corporate inertia, on formats that have become de facto standards (.docx and .xlsx rule half the world), on integrations with thousands of applications and on enterprise contracts signed for several years. Any alternative has to solve file compatibility and migration before talking about AI.

There have been serious attempts before. Zoho has offered a full suite for years, and more recent projects have tried collaborative or cloud first approaches. None has significantly moved the two giants' share. That Turakhia is putting in his own money suggests a long term bet, without the pressure of a fund demanding fast returns, which in such a slow market can be an advantage.

Who it might make sense for

The natural audience for a product like this is not the large corporations anchored to Microsoft, at least not at first. It is small teams, startups and companies that start with no legacy, for whom cost per user and an integrated AI experience matter more than pixel perfect compatibility with macros inherited from Excel. That is where a new suite has room to enter.

It also matters for anyone watching the assistant ecosystem: every suite born with native AI is a market test of how much the user really values having these features built in versus paying for them as an add on. Turakhia's $30 million is, in that sense, an expensive but informative experiment.

Our take

Funding the project with his own money is the most interesting part of the news: it removes the urgency to grow at any cost and allows iteration without the sword of a next round hanging over it. Even so, the history of Office challengers invites caution. Built in AI is a good selling point, but it rarely suffices on its own to move a company off a suite that already works. We will have to see whether Neo solves the boring part, compatibility and migration, with the same ambition it puts into the flashy one.