Meta AI director Rohit Patel exits to build Ndoc, an AI-native Office rival
What's the deal? Rohit Patel, a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, is leaving after eight years to launch Ndoc, a startup pitched as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, TechCrunch reported on October 27. At Meta, he focused on reinforcement learning and evaluating whether AI output is trustworthy.
What's the endgame? Ndoc aims to replace the fragmented way people work across Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit, and "ChatGPT copy-paste" with one unified workspace. It brings together three components: a Stage tab for presentations, a Narrative tab for analyses and citations, and a Model tab housing datasets and Python scripts.
Why the design? Patel's background shapes the product. He believes anyone should be able to check AI's work. "Even if you don't know any Python, you can ask [the AI chat] to explain," he said. "There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here."
Patel's larger ambition is to reinvent the file. Documents can be exported as a single ".ndoc.html" file that opens in any browser, a format he plans to open-source so developers aren't locked in. That desire partly drove his exit: at Meta, agreeing on an open format would need "hundreds of people and opinions."
Why now? Patel is the latest in a string of Meta departures, following Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, researcher Andrew Tulloch, and AI-for-Work product head Emily Dalton Smith. He wanted to move faster: "Humans can only move at human pace, whereas…I can move at the pace of what AI can do."
What could go wrong? Ndoc is a big bet for a team of three with no funding, still at enterprise-pilot and limited-alpha stage. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have all shipped enterprise AI tools that plug into existing suites, and last month OpenAI launched Space, a shared workspace inside ChatGPT.
The signal: Microsoft and Google are rapidly turning their suites into AI workspaces — Gemini agents across Workspace, wider Copilot reach. Patel's pitch to replace fragmented workflows rather than bolt an assistant onto them is timely, but his open-source format and ability to win team adoption are the real tests.
Read more: TechCrunch
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
