How Goa-based Shivank Prabhudessai’s NativeOffice is taking on MS Office with a 100 MB suite

Most office software assumes a powerful computer. Shivank Prabhudessai, Founder and CEO of NativeOffice Technologies LLP, started from the opposite assumption. His Goa-based company makes NativeOffice, an office suite meant for the laptops and phones people already have.

The problem: big installs, small machines

A typical Microsoft Office installation needs 4 to 5 GB of space. Plenty of computers in Indian homes, shops and small offices are older or entry-level models with little storage and memory. For those users, a heavy install can slow the whole machine down.

NativeOffice’s Windows suite installs in under 100 MB and uses about 128 MB of RAM. It handles documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDF, and it is written in native C++. That is a big part of why it stays small and opens quickly.

Standard files, no lock-in

The suite reads and saves the standard DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and PDF formats, so users can swap files with colleagues on other software. It is available on the Microsoft Store and from nativeoffice.online.

Why Goa

In Prabhudessai’s words:

“We started NativeOffice in Goa because we wanted to show that a serious software product can be built here, not only in the big metros. Most people don’t need a heavy office package. They need something that opens fast, works on the machine they have, and lets them get their work done. That is what we are trying to build.”

The team develops all its apps in Goa. Prabhudessai has been working on NativeOffice since January 2026.

From the PC to the phone

After the response from Windows users, the company brought the suite to Android as NativeOffice Mobile. NativeOffice Mobile launched on Google Play just 10 days ago, and users have already made more than 1,00,000 document edits. Two more Android apps followed: NativeOffice Scan: PDF Scanner, for turning paper documents into PDFs, and Pinwheel, a photo and video editor.

The question about AI

Prabhudessai hears one question often: why isn’t he building an AI model, when that is where the trend is? His answer is that he is. “People ask me why I’m not building an AI model. The truth is I am also developing AI models,” he says. “But my first focus was a privacy-first office suite, so that what we build isn’t taken by people in other countries. To reach the peak of the Himalayas, you first have to climb the lower mountains.”

The next mountain is a frontier AI model company for India. He has already built his own language model, Stasis 1, at about 110 million parameters. He did not start from someone else’s model and adapt it; he pretrained Stasis 1 entirely from scratch, on free GPUs. It is closing in on GPT-2, and the aim is to surpass it soon.

He has also worked on existing open models. He fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder 14B and significantly improved its MMLU and HumanEval scores, a result that shows the AI and machine learning engineering behind his plans.

Bigger models will take more than free compute. “Building larger models will need significant funding,” he says. “I’m open to talking with investors.”

Where things stand

Across its apps, NativeOffice is approaching 10,000 users worldwide. The company is a member of NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups.

The plan from here is the same as at the start: keep the apps light, keep them working on ordinary hardware, and keep building from Goa.

Website: https://nativeoffice.online LinkedIn: NativeOffice