Ex-Meta AI Director Launches Ndoc to Rival Office and Workspace
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Rohit Patel, a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, is leaving Meta after eight years of building AI there. He has started Ndoc, a company he describes as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.
Patel joins several other high-profile exits from Meta. Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch and Emily Dalton Smith, head of product for AI-for-work, have also left.
One workspace instead of six tools
Ndoc is meant to replace the patchwork of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit and "ChatGPT copy-paste" with a single workspace. Colleagues can open it even if they have not signed up.
The layout has three tabs. Stage holds the presentations: slide decks, dashboards, simulations and mini apps. Narrative carries the analysis, numbered citations and generated figures. Model stores the datasets and Python scripts underneath.
The design follows Patel's work at Meta, where he focused on reinforcement learning and on judging whether AI output can be trusted. He wants anyone to be able to check what the AI produced. Users can read the Python behind a document and ask the chat to explain it.
"There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here."
A user can upload a dataset, ask Ndoc to run an analysis and have it write a narrative. Audience, tone and memory can be set per document. Patel says the memory covers the person, the document, the team and the company.
Ndoc is built and fine-tuned on a mix of open-source models. Patel says that makes it much cheaper to run than tools built on frontier models. Early trial users did not care about that, he says. They liked seeing everything end to end in one place.
A new file format
Patel also wants to reinvent the file. Documents export as a single ".ndoc.html" file that opens in any browser. He plans to open-source the format so other developers can build apps around it. That plan was part of his reason for leaving Meta, where agreeing on an open format would take input from "hundreds of people." He wanted to move quickly. "Humans can only move at human pace, whereas…I can move at the pace of what AI can do," he said.
He is starting with a team of three and no funding. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, SpaceXAI and Google all offer enterprise AI tools that plug into Workspace and Microsoft 365, and OpenAI launched Space, a shared workspace in ChatGPT, last month. Patel says Space could be a threat, but argues the labs have the wrong idea. In his words, companies are attaching AI to spreadsheets so it fills in the cells.
Ndoc has connectors that import data from tools customers already use. Patel set himself a bar for the product: "I'm not going to release anything I don't love using," he said. As of Tuesday it is running an enterprise pilot and opening an alpha to a limited number of customers from its wait list. Signing up is free, and customers pay for usage and tokens.
Patel hopes to release a beta in the coming weeks and plans a full launch next year. He says he did not want to take money until he had proof that people love the product.
Source: TechCrunch