Introduction
The enterprise productivity suite is one of the most entrenched markets in all of enterprise IT. Microsoft 365 claims nearly 446 million paid seats worldwide and dominates the enterprise segment with around 58% market share. Google Workspace holds most of the rest. Between the two, few players have survived long enough to mount a credible challenge.
Bhavin Turakhia — the Indian entrepreneur who co-founded Directi at age 19 and has since led several successful technology ventures, including Zeta in B2B financial services — has decided to take that bet. In July 2026, he went public with his fifth project: Neo, an enterprise work platform combining project management, documents, file storage, and artificial intelligence. He has personally invested $30M.
Starting Over Rather Than Patching Legacy
Turakhia's thesis can be distilled into a single analogy: you can't build an iPhone by soldering Nokia parts together. The critique lands squarely on the approach taken by both Microsoft and Google, which have grafted their AI assistants — Copilot for the former, Gemini for the latter — onto architectures designed decades ago, long before generative AI rewrote the rules.
It's a charge worth taking seriously. While Microsoft Copilot surpassed 20 million paid seats in spring 2026, its effective utilization rate among employees with access sits at just 36%. For a feature positioned as transformative, that figure raises uncomfortable questions about the depth of integration users actually experience.
Neo is built on a different premise: AI as an active participant in the workflow, not a bolt-on module you open in a separate window. The platform is also model-agnostic, meaning enterprises can switch AI providers without being locked into any single ecosystem. For CIOs wrestling with vendor dependency risk — in a market where models evolve fast and technological lock-in carries a real cost — that's a potentially decisive differentiator.
A Founder With a Proven Track Record
What distinguishes Neo from the crowded field of SaaS challengers is the profile of the person behind it. Turakhia is not a first-timer: Directi became a reference player in domain names and internet infrastructure; Zeta now operates at scale across B2B financial services. With 45 employees — including 18 engineers — and a target of 100 hires by the end of 2026, the organization is lean, but the roadmap is deliberate.
The product launched internally in April 2026, stress-tested across Turakhia's own companies before any external rollout. The initial target: SMBs and knowledge workers in tech, consulting, and professional services — organizations agile enough to make a tool switch, and sophisticated enough to understand an architectural argument.
What IT Leaders Should Take Away
Neo's emergence raises a question that extends well beyond a vendor rivalry: are today's productivity suites — even those with AI layered on top — genuinely fit for the next five years of work? For IT decision-makers, the evaluation calculus is shifting. Features and pricing still matter, but the ability to integrate AI coherently into core business processes — while preserving freedom of choice over underlying models — is fast becoming a selection criterion in its own right.
Neo has yet to prove it can sustain its momentum against incumbents investing billions per quarter in their platforms. But the project surfaces a real tension running through enterprise software: between legacy suites accumulating functional layers year after year, and platforms born in the AI era that start from a blank page. How that tension resolves will shape a meaningful portion of the enterprise software landscape over the next five years.