TechCrunch: A founder self-funds $30M to build an AI-native office suite

Bhavin Turakhia — serial entrepreneur and founder of Directi, Zeta, and Titan — announced in July 2026 that he is personally investing $30 million to build Neo, an AI-native workplace platform intended to compete directly with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Unlike products that add AI features to existing tools, Neo is being built from scratch around AI capabilities as a design constraint from the start.

Turakhia’s core argument for rebuilding rather than extending existing software is architectural: products designed before the AI era carry structural decisions optimized for older workflows, and adding AI to them produces a patchwork product rather than a coherent one. His stated analogy is that building an iPhone requires different decisions than modifying a Nokia. The platform integrates project management, document editing, file storage, and AI capabilities in a single product. The initial target market is mid-sized businesses in technology, consulting, and professional services.

Why this matters for product managers

Neo is a concrete instance of a strategic product question that has become more common in 2026: when does it make more sense to rebuild from a new set of assumptions than to extend an existing product?

The argument Turakhia is making — that incumbents face structural disadvantages when retrofitting AI — is not specific to enterprise software. Product teams at companies that have layered AI features onto legacy products should consider whether they are extending something that will continue to hold, or whether the architecture underneath has become a constraint on what they can ship.

As a competitive signal, Neo is also worth tracking for what it reveals about where challenger products see the weakness in Office and Workspace: not missing features, but structural limits on what those products can become.