Meta AI Director Rohit Patel Exits to Launch Ndoc Office Rival

Rohit Patel spent eight years at Meta, most recently as a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs working on reinforcement learning and AI evaluation. He is leaving to run Ndoc full-time, a three-person startup with no outside funding that he describes as a replacement for the Microsoft Office suite and Google Workspace. TechCrunch reports an enterprise pilot is underway, an alpha is opening to a limited waitlist, a beta is planned in coming weeks, and the full launch is next year.

The product splits into three tabs. Stage holds presentations, including slide decks, dashboards, simulations and mini apps. Narrative holds analyses with numbered citations, generated figures and supporting reasoning. Model holds the underlying datasets and Python scripts. Documents export as .ndoc.html files that open in any browser, and Patel plans to open-source the format.

Patel's pitch is largely a complaint about what he sees elsewhere. "Companies are basically attaching AI to spreadsheets and it fills your cells for you. It just sort of kills my soul," he told TechCrunch. "This is like if you just figured out electricity, and then you decided the best use case is to put lights on my bulls that till my soil. No. Get a tractor."

He says the open-source format was part of why he left Meta: at a company that size, he said, agreeing on one would have required "hundreds of people and opinions on how the format should look." Ndoc is built and fine-tuned on a mixture of open-source models, which Patel says costs less to run than alternatives built on frontier systems. He is holding off on raising. "I didn't want to take money until I had some proof that people love the product," he said.

What surprised him in testing was not the auditability of the Python layer but the layout. "I thought that's what people would be excited about, but people don't care about that," he said. "What people are excited about is that they love seeing all their end-to-end in one place."