BENGALURU, July 5 -- Bhavin Turakhia has started six companies in a little over two decades, and he funded most of them out of his own pocket before any venture capitalist would take the meeting. His newest bet is $30 million of that same money, aimed at a target most founders would consider suicidal: Microsoft Office.

The company is called Neo, and its premise is narrower than it sounds. Turakhia is not arguing that Word, Excel and Outlook are bad products. He is arguing that bolting a chatbot onto software designed two decades before generative AI existed, which is what Microsoft has done with Copilot and what Google has done with its Workspace AI features, cannot produce software that actually thinks alongside the person using it. Neo...