Ex-Meta AI Director Rohit Patel Leaves to Launch Ndoc, Challenging Microsoft Office and Google Workspace

According to an exclusive report by TechCrunch, Rohit Patel, who spent eight years developing AI at Meta, has departed the company. As the former director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, he has founded a startup called Ndoc, which aims to create an AI-native office suite directly competing with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.

Patel designed Ndoc not merely to layer AI tools onto existing workflows, but to replace fragmented tools like Excel, Word, and PowerPoint with a unified workspace. The platform features three core tabs: Stage for presentations and dashboards, Narrative for analyses and the logic behind the numbers, and Model for underlying datasets and Python scripts. This design allows users to verify AI-generated content, such as viewing the Python code used to create documents.

Patel stated that Ndoc is built using a mixture of open-source models, costing less to run than alternatives based on frontier AI models. His larger ambition is to reinvent the file itself, planning to export documents as '.ndoc.html' files openable in any browser and open-sourcing the format to prevent developer lock-in. Currently, Ndoc is conducting an enterprise pilot and opening an alpha version to limited customers, with a full launch planned for next year.