Rohit Patel Leaves Meta to Challenge Microsoft Office With Ndoc

Rohit Patel has left Meta after eight years to launch Ndoc, a startup pitched as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office suite and Google Workspace, TechCrunch reported on October 27, 2026. Patel was a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, where he worked on reinforcement learning and on evaluating whether AI output can be trusted.

What is Ndoc?

Ndoc combines three tabs in a single workspace, according to TechCrunch's report. The Stage tab holds finished output — slide decks, dashboards, simulations, or small apps. The Narrative tab carries the analysis behind that output, including numbered citations and generated figures. The Model tab stores the underlying datasets and Python scripts that produced the work.

Why build it this way?

Patel's reinforcement-learning and evaluation work at Meta shaped the design, per TechCrunch. His premise: if AI is going to generate the spreadsheets and slide decks companies use to make decisions, someone has to be able to check that work line by line.

"Even if you don't know any Python, you can ask [the AI chat] to explain, 'Hey, what does this script do? Which line has my formula?' And you can verify that formula," Patel told TechCrunch. "There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here."

How does it compare to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace?

Rather than bolting an AI assistant onto Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, Patel designed Ndoc to replace the handoffs between those tools and others such as Tableau, Replit, and manual ChatGPT copy-paste work, TechCrunch reported. Users upload a dataset, ask Ndoc to run an analysis, and get a narrative plus visual output in one place. Documents can be exported as a single ".ndoc.html" file that opens in any browser — a format Patel told TechCrunch he intends to open-source.

Patel said Ndoc runs on a mix of open-source models built and fine-tuned in-house, which he says makes it considerably cheaper to operate than tools built on frontier AI models. But that wasn't the selling point with early trial users, he told TechCrunch: "I thought that's what people would be excited about, but people don't care about that. What people are excited about is that they love seeing all their end-to-end in one place."

Ndoc is also built so colleagues can view and edit shared work even if they aren't signed up for the platform themselves, according to the report.

Who else has left Meta recently?

Patel's departure follows a string of high-profile exits from Meta, TechCrunch noted, including Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, and Emily Dalton Smith, who had been head of product for AI-for-Work.

What's next for Ndoc?

TechCrunch's report did not include funding figures, user numbers, or a public launch date for Ndoc. Patel described early trials with users testing the combined analysis-and-presentation workflow, but the company has not disclosed broader commercial availability. HTT News will update this story as Ndoc releases more detail on pricing, funding, and launch timing.