Rippling

Rippling sells a single cloud platform for the administrative work that follows an employee through a company: payroll and benefits, HR records and onboarding, device and application access, and, more recently, expense management, corporate cards and bill pay. Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar founded the company in San Francisco in 2016, and it spent roughly two years in stealth before selling to customers.

The company's stated thesis is that employee data is the shared dependency underneath a surprisingly large number of business systems, and that keeping that data consistent across separate databases is what makes running many systems expensive. Rippling's answer is a single record that propagates changes outward: a hire, a promotion or a departure updates payroll, benefits, permissions and hardware in one action rather than a dozen.

That premise has driven a deliberate expansion well beyond HR software. Rippling now lists more than two dozen products across HR, IT and spend, and spends an unusually high share of revenue on research and development — Conrad has put the figure at 45 to 50 per cent. Recent launches include Rippling AI, an AI-powered Data Cloud that pulls third-party business data in against worker identity, and business banking with same-day payroll.

The company is private and, by its chief executive's account, intends to stay that way for the time being. It has raised roughly $1.85 billion across eight rounds, was last priced at $16.8 billion in the Series G of May 2025, and has used tender offers rather than a listing to give employees and early investors liquidity. It employs around 5,000 people, with offices in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Singapore and Australia.