Meta AI Director Rohit Patel Exits to Launch Ndoc, an AI-Native Workspace Aimed at Office and Google Workspace

Rohit Patel, a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, is leaving the company after eight years of AI work to launch Ndoc, a startup he describes as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, TechCrunch reported.

His departure follows those of Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, and Head of Product for AI-for-Work Emily Dalton Smith, according to the report.

Ndoc is designed to replace fragmented work across tools such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit, and copy-pasted ChatGPT output with a single workspace colleagues can access even without signing up. The platform combines a Stage tab for presentations, dashboards, simulations, and mini apps; a Narrative tab for analyses, numbered citations, and generated figures; and a Model tab housing underlying datasets and Python scripts.

The design draws on Patel's Meta work in reinforcement learning and evaluating whether AI output can be trusted. Users can inspect the Python scripts behind documents, and Patel said the AI chat can explain what a script does and which line contains a given formula. "There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here," he said.

Users can upload a dataset, request an analysis and written narrative, and add context such as audience, tone, and memory, which Patel said persists across the person, document, team, and company. Ndoc is built and fine-tuned on a mixture of open source models and, according to Patel, costs considerably less to run than alternatives built on frontier models.

Patel's broader aim is to reinvent the file itself. Documents export as a single ".ndoc.html" file openable in any browser, a format he plans to open-source so developers can build compatible apps without lock-in. That ambition partly drove his exit from Meta, where agreeing on an open format would require input from "hundreds of people and opinions on how the format should look."

The bet is large for a founder with a team of three and no funding, as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google all ship enterprise AI tools that connect to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Patel acknowledged OpenAI's recently launched shared workspace inside ChatGPT could pose a threat but argued the labs have the wrong approach. "Companies are basically attaching AI to spreadsheets and it fills your cells for you," he said. "It just sort of kills my soul."

Ndoc offers connectors so customers can import data from existing tools. "My bar was that I'm not going to release anything I don't love using," Patel said, adding that he wanted proof customers love the product before raising money.

As of Tuesday, Ndoc is running an enterprise pilot and opening a limited alpha to wait-listed customers. Sign-up is free, with charges for usage and tokens; a beta is planned in coming weeks and a full launch next year. Patel said speed matters more than a perfect first product: "Execution is extremely cheap...so go execute on a suboptimal plan and worry about it later."

Source: TechCrunch