US-based HR tech company Rippling to expand in India: CEO Parker Conrad

Headquartered in San Francisco, Rippling combines all of the workforce systems normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers

US-based HR and payment software startup Rippling is expanding its India operations and plans to hire over 100 people in Bengaluru. Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and finance.

“We're hiring, probably over 100 engineers in Bengaluru. In the next year, we (plan) several hundred additional employees, across all functions in the business,” said Parker Conrad, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rippling, in an interview. “We are hiring engineers, product managers, designers, salespeople, and those who work in finance and customer support.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, Rippling has raised $1.2 billion from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock. It combines all of the workforce systems normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. It provides the technology and services to over 10,000 customers. The company has 2,500 employees globally and over 500 employees in India.

Earlier, Rippling’s business was focused exclusively on the United States. Over the last year, it has been expanding to new geographies such as Canada, the UK, and Australia. The firm has a substantial sales team in India, but it mainly caters to customers based in the US.

“I think what will happen at some point soon is we will start selling at least a global portion of our product to businesses that are based in India as well,” said Conrad.

Rippling’s product mainly deals with global workforce management. It is planning to tap companies in India that have employees in different parts of the world.

“They can have one system that can handle everything,” said Conrad. “We're the only company that has built a native multinational payroll engine.”

For instance, companies can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, one can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. The system calculates the taxes and pays the employees in different currencies based on the location.

Conrad is a three-time entrepreneur. Formerly he was Co-Founder and CEO of software firm Zenefits and Co-Founder of fintech company SigFig.

Rippling came under the spotlight last year in March during the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which is now known as the ‘Lehman moment’ for the technology industry. Founded in 1983, California-based SVB was a key source of funding for small tech firms and venture capital companies.

After coming to know that some of its clients' payroll funds were stuck at SVB, Conrad decided to use $130 million from Rippling’s balance sheet to ensure payrolls were processed on time.

He also made efforts to raise money from investors, whose funds were also locked with SVB. Such quick fundraising activity also highlighted the chaos created due to the fast collapse of SVB on March 10, 2023.

A week after that, Rippling said it raised $500 million in a round led by Greenoaks. The round valued the company at $11.25 billion, the same as the company’s Series D financing in May 2022. It was initially intended to help customers make payroll in the immediate aftermath of SVB’s collapse.

“I was planning a trip to Bengaluru, the weekend SVB collapsed and I had to cancel it last minute,” said Conrad. “We worked through the weekend, moving all of our banking rails in the United States from SVB over to JP Morgan Chase so that people would get paid on time. It was a huge effort.”

Conrad said that the crisis at SVB was very hard to foresee as it was one of the largest banks in the US. No one understood the financial difficulties that it was facing until it collapsed. “What worked well for us in that crisis was over-communication with clients,” said Conrad, when asked about the learnings from the SVB crisis. “By getting out there and keeping everyone up to date, I think we turned a situation that could have been negative into a positive event for our company. We got a lot of credit from customers for being transparent and making sure that employees got paid and doing the right thing.”