Meta AI director leaves to build Office/Workspace rival
Original: Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace
Why This Matters
Enterprise productivity is a massive market; AI-native challengers could disrupt incumbents fast.
Rohit Patel, former director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, has left Meta after 8 years to launch Ndoc, an AI-native productivity startup aiming to replace Microsoft Office and Google Workspace with a unified workspace.
After eight years at Meta, Rohit Patel has quietly exited to launch Ndoc, a startup built to replace the fragmented stack of tools — Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit, and ChatGPT copy-paste — with a single AI-native workspace. His departure adds to a string of notable exits from Meta, including Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, and Head of Product for AI-for-Work Emily Dalton Smith.
Ndoc organizes work into three tabs: Stage (presentations, dashboards, apps), Narrative (analysis and the reasoning behind the numbers), and Model (raw datasets and Python scripts). The structure is a direct reflection of Patel's Meta background in reinforcement learning and AI output evaluation. His core pitch is transparency — users can inspect the Python scripts behind any AI-generated chart or spreadsheet, and query the AI to explain specific lines of code. "There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here," Patel told TechCrunch.
The platform maintains memory across individual users, documents, teams, and companies. It's built on fine-tuned open-source models rather than frontier APIs, which Patel says keeps costs significantly lower. Interestingly, early users weren't moved by the cost angle — they responded to the end-to-end integration. Documents export as a single `.ndoc.html` file that opens in any browser, even for non-Ndoc users.