Workforce management startup Rippling raises $450M at $16.8B valuation – News

Workforce management startup Rippling People Center Inc. has raised $450 million in additional funding, multiple publications reported today.

The Series G round didn’t have a lead investor. Y Combinator, Sands Capital, Goldman Sachs Growth, Baillie Gifford and GIC were among the participants. In parallel with the investment, Rippling held a $200 million tender offer that allowed current and former employees to sell some of their shares.

The company is now worth $16.8 billion, $3.4 billion more than the valuation it received in its previous funding round last February. The valuation increase is a reflection of Rippling’s rapid sales growth. According to The Information, the software maker’s annual recurring revenue more than doubled in 2023 to over $350 million and recently topped $570 million.

Chief Executive Officer Parker Conrad told CNBC today that the company’s current growth rate is “well over 30%.” It’s currently prioritizing its top line over profitability, he added. The company doesn’t plan to go public in the foreseeable future.

Rippling provides a cloud platform that human resources teams use to manage payroll and benefits. It also includes features that promise to simplify recruiting. According to the company, HR professionals can use its platform to create a careers page for their organization and post openings to 25,000 job boards at once.

In addition to helping HR teams hire new personnel, Rippling allows them to create training programs for existing employees. The platform provides access to a library of more than 80,000 e-learning courses. HR professionals developing a new training program can ask an artificial intelligence chatbot for advice on which courses to include.

Alongside its core HR features, Rippling provides a set of tools for information technology teams. Those tools mainly focus on helping administrators manage employee access to internal applications. An IT department could, for example, condition employees’ access to a sensitive database on the completion of a cybersecurity training course. 

Administrators can also configure Rippling to perform some access management tasks automatically. When developers switch teams, the platform can automatically provide them with access to the new team’s GitHub repository and programming tools. A password manager allows workers to sign into shared applications with a single set of account credentials.

Another task that Rippling promises to ease is device management. IT teams can use the platform to issue work computers to employees, as well as remotely delete the data on those devices if they’re lost. Accounting teams, in turn, can issue corporate credit cards and track spending.

Rippling says its platform’s installed base includes more than 20,000 organizations. The company will reportedly use its latest funding round to extend the platform’s feature set and launch new products. 

Image: Rippling