Warp Raises $60M to Take On ADP, Rippling, and the 75-Year-Old Payroll Problem

Payroll has not meaningfully changed since 1949. That is not a hot take. That is just the truth. When Henry Taub founded what would eventually become ADP, the problem was painfully simple: one person ran payroll, that person got sick, and nobody got paid. Jump to 2026, and the mechanics underneath most payroll platforms still ask humans to chase tax jurisdictions, file compliance paperwork, and manually resolve government notices. Warp thinks that era is finished. And it just raised $60 million to back that belief.

What Is Warp and What Does It Do?

Warp is building one platform to handle payroll, HR, compliance, benefits, IT, onboarding, offboarding, and workforce operations. All of it. Under one roof.

The pitch is not “we do it better.” It is “we do it completely differently.”

Most HR software was built for slow-moving enterprises. At its core, it is manual work dressed up with a cleaner interface. Same complexity. Same errors. Same time drain. Just with a nicer coat of paint. Warp’s founding idea is simple but radical: what if payroll actually worked? Not worked better. Worked completely. Automatically. Invisibly.

CEO Ayush Sharma and CTO Adam Rankin co-founded the company. Sharma is an MIT-trained machine learning engineer who grew up in a small town in India and, by his own account, was the first person from a 250-million-population state to study at MIT for undergrad. He did not stumble into payroll from a consulting deck. He ran payroll himself at his last startup. Lost hours to state tax filings. Chased government notices that should have taken minutes and consumed weeks. That experience is what started all of this. The company is headquartered in New York City and today has over 50 people on the team.

Warp Raises $60M: Who Led the Round?

Battery Ventures led the $60 million Series B. Joining them were Peak XV, Sound Ventures, Y Combinator, and HOF Capital. And the round also pulled in some serious operator weight: Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, and Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, came in alongside returning backers.

Here is the kicker. Warp was not even planning to raise until fall. The round came together in six days. Six. That is not a fundraising process. That is a signal. When investors are moving that fast, they are not doing it because the deck was pretty.

Battery Ventures General Partner Michael Brown put it plainly. Payroll processing has been around for over 70 years. And it has only gotten marginally better. The hard part, he said, has always been compliance. That is exactly where Warp is planting its flag.

How Much Is Warp Worth After This Funding Round?

Warp has not disclosed a formal valuation. So let’s talk about what we do know.

This $60 million Series B brings Warp’s total funding to $85 million in just under a year. The platform now serves over 1,000 customers. It has processed more than $600 million in payroll in the past year alone. And it is on track to cross $2 billion in payroll volume in the next twelve months.

The company doubled its ARR in Q1. It signed enterprise customers with thousands of employees. It launched two full product lines back to back: Warp Benefits Brokerage and Warp Fabric, an AI-native IT automation suite built entirely in-house.

The reality is, at this growth rate, the valuation conversation becomes almost secondary. When a company doubles ARR in a single quarter and is scaling toward $2 billion in payroll volume, investors are not waiting for a formal number to get excited.

What Will Warp Do With the $60 Million?

Two things. In parallel.

First, building out the full employee management platform with serious engineering depth across every product surface. Second, building the agent infrastructure to actually act on that data, not just read it.

Warp is about to make its customer-facing agent generally available. The idea is straightforward: users will be able to script complex multi-step onboarding and compliance workflows using plain natural language. No IT tickets. No waiting for someone to configure a rule. Just tell it what you need and it handles the rest.

The internal mantra is “Make something agents want.” That says a lot about how the team thinks.

And the team is growing. Warp has been hiring aggressively across all functions in NYC. The goal, in Sharma’s own words, is building something with Workday-grade power but with the usability and feel of an Apple product. That combination, enterprise depth with consumer-grade experience, is genuinely hard to pull off. But that is where the capital is pointed.

Who Are Warp’s Biggest Investors?

Battery Ventures led this round. Peak XV, Sound Ventures (backed by Ashton Kutcher and Effie Epstein), Y Combinator, and HOF Capital all participated. On the individual side, Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Arash Ferdowsi of Dropbox, and Harj Taggar at Y Combinator doubled down. Earlier backers include Balaji Srinivasan, Kyle Vogt, Kevin Hartz, Amjad Masad of Replit, and operators from OpenAI.

These are not passive check writers. Most of them have built or scaled companies that dealt with exactly the payroll and compliance chaos Warp is solving. They know what it costs in founder time. They know what it costs in missed hires and delayed onboarding. So when they invest here, it carries a different kind of weight.

But what really stands out is the repeat conviction. Several of these investors have backed Warp across multiple rounds. That kind of follow-on commitment is one of the strongest signals in venture.

How Does Warp Compare to Other AI Developer Tools?

Let’s be honest. This space is not empty.

ADP has been around for 75 years. Workday built a multi-billion-dollar business and still has a massive customer base. Rippling has raised over a billion dollars. Gusto and Deel are both well-funded and growing.

So the question is not whether Warp can compete. The question is whether it is genuinely different. And on that point, the numbers are hard to argue with.

There are over 10,000 tax jurisdictions in the US alone. With Warp, companies do not need to understand that those jurisdictions exist. Warp tracks the changes, flags the updates, and handles the filings. The average Warp customer grows 5x faster than their peers while running with one-tenth of the HR and administrative overhead. That is not a small gap. That is a structural one.

Beyond payroll, Warp is now a licensed nationwide benefits broker, covering medical, dental, vision, 401k, and life insurance. It has built in-house device management, a capability that currently only Rippling offers among direct competitors in this category. And it covers all 50 US states plus over 1,000 localities.

So where legacy players are bolting AI features onto old architectures, Warp was built on AI reasoning from day one. That is the actual difference.

What’s Next for Warp After This Funding?

Sharma has a pointed view on where this market goes. Incumbents like Workday, he argues, risk becoming what he calls “dumb data stores” that external agents simply read. The real value, he believes, will migrate to whoever sits at the orchestration layer and acts on that data. Warp wants to be that layer.

That is an aggressive bet. But it is a well-timed one.

Post-COVID, 50% of startups now hire across multiple states from day one, up 3x since 2019. Legacy providers crack under that kind of multi-state complexity. That is the exact gap Warp was designed to fill. And with $60 million now in the bank, the speed at which they can go after it has changed considerably.

The company has already signed its first enterprise customers with thousands of employees. So this is not purely a startup tool anymore. The move upmarket is already underway.

And the product roadmap is clear: broader platform, deeper automation, and an agent layer that can handle multi-step compliance and onboarding workflows in plain language. The goal is not to make payroll slightly less painful. The goal is to make it invisible.

Payroll has been a source of founder stress for 75 years. Warp raises $60M with a clear bet: that streak ends here.