Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace
TechCrunch Rebecca Bellan
A former Meta AI director has launched Ndoc, a startup trying to replace Office and Google Workspace. Its pitch is one shared workspace for docs, data, code, and checks — not just another chatbot layer.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan — read the original for the full story.
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After eight years building AI at Meta, Rohit Patel is out. TechCrunch says the former Meta Superintelligence Labs director has started Ndoc, a startup aimed squarely at Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, not at the usual “AI helper” bolted on top of them.
Patel’s pitch is blunt: stop bouncing between Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit and copy-pasting from ChatGPT. Ndoc is meant to hold the whole workflow in one place, and let colleagues open and work with the same material even if they never sign up themselves.
The product is split into three parts. Stage is for the polished output — slide decks, dashboards, simulations or small apps. Narrative is for the explanation layer, with analysis, numbered citations and generated figures. Model is where the underlying data and Python scripts sit. That last part matters to Patel, who spent his Meta years focused on reinforcement learning and on judging whether AI output can be trusted.
He wants users to be able to check the machine’s work. If Ndoc writes a formula or builds a document, the underlying script is there to inspect, and the AI can explain what a line does. Patel says the system can also remember context at several levels — the person, the document, the team and the company — and that it can ingest an uploaded dataset, analyze it, then write up the findings.
There’s a bigger gamble underneath all that. Patel says Ndoc is built and fine-tuned with a mix of open source models, and because it was developed from scratch, it should cost less to run than tools built on frontier models. But early users didn’t care much about the economics. They liked seeing the full workflow in one place. Patel also wants to open-source a browser-readable “.ndoc.html” format so other developers can build on it without getting trapped inside his system — the same lock-in he says people have lived with for years inside Microsoft and Google.
He left Meta partly so he could move faster on that idea. Ndoc has a team of three, no funding, an enterprise pilot running, and a limited alpha for people on the wait list. It’s free to join, usage and tokens will cost money, a beta is due in the coming weeks, and a full launch is planned for next year.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of heresy: not “AI in spreadsheets,” but a shot at replacing the spreadsheet cult entirely. Big labs love attaching models to old software because it’s safe and familiar; founders like Patel are the ones trying to break the furniture. That usually makes everyone nervous, which is how you know it might be interesting.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch