Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is making a $30 million personal bet that there is still room for another enterprise AI company. His new venture, NewBuilt, is based on a simple premise: workplace software designed before the AI era cannot just be upgraded with chatbots – it has to be completely redesigned.
Turakhia, 46, has a long history of making ambitious technology bets in the venture space. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded several companies, including Directi, Radix, Titan and banking software firm Zeta, backing them largely with his own cash before bringing in outside investors. He’s doing the same with Neo.
Turakhia told TechCrunch he’s raising so much money because he believes AI marks a significant technological shift that justifies reinventing workplace software.
“If you want to make an iPhone, you can’t take Nokia parts and somehow turn it into an iPhone,” he said.
Launched internally in April this year, Neo is an enterprise work platform that combines project management, documents, file storage, and AI into a single product.
The goal, Turakhia said, is to make AI an active participant in day-to-day work, not just a sideline to other support staff.
Turakhia argued that most incumbents face a structural disadvantage when adding AI to products designed before generic AI. Neo was built for AI and is model-agnostic, he said, allowing enterprises to switch between AI models rather than being tied to a single provider.
He is not alone in thinking like this. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya initially launched enterprise AI coding venture 8090 with his capital before raising $135 million in funding this week.
Still, Turakhia’s bet comes as enterprise AI has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in technology. Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are embedding AI into their workplace software. Meanwhile, every startup, from giant labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to productivity companies like Notion and Superhuman, is racing to reshape how businesses use AI in their daily workflows.
Turakhia argued that enterprise software has never been a take-all market, saying that even a small portion of global enterprise AI spending will represent a big company.
“Even if we end up with 2% to 5% market share, it’s bigger than anything I’ve ever built,” he said.
For the past few months, Neo has been in internal use at Turakhia’s companies, including Zeta. The company plans to launch the software for medium-sized businesses in the coming months, initially targeting knowledge workers in technology, consulting and professional services firms.
Turakhia said that while Neo’s initial platform was built in three months, AI was used extensively in the development process; he estimates that it would take more than a year of work with a much larger engineering team before generative AI was developed.
The Bengaluru-based startup currently has around 45 employees, including 18 engineers. Turakhia told TechCrunch it expects to grow to about 100 employees by the end of the year, with most of the new hires focused on AI and software engineering.
