The last time Parker Conrad built a company, the compliance playbook blew up in his face. SEC fine. Board pressure. A front-row seat to the risks of moving fast without keeping your legal house in order. Most people would've tapped out. Parker rewired.
In 2016, he walked out of Zenefits with a bruised reputation and a sharper eye for the broken stuff hiding inside companies. HR systems that don’t talk to IT. Finance teams lost in email threads. Employee data scattered like confetti across a dozen tools no one controls. So, he did what any battle-tested founder with something to prove would do, he started building Rippling.
Eight years and $1.987 billion later, Rippling just closed a monster Series F: $200 million in primary capital and $590 million in secondary. Led by the sharp minds at Coatue, with returning heat from Founders Fund, Greenoaks, and Dragoneer joining the table, the company now sits at a $13.5 billion post-money valuation. And no, that’s not a typo.
From a business case perspective, the numbers don’t whisper, they slap. $412 million in 2024 revenue. 2,000+ global clients. Offices across 50+ countries. Certifications most platforms can’t spell, SOC1/2/3, ISO27001, ISO27018, CSA STAR Level2, because enterprise doesn’t care about your pitch deck, they care about proof.
Rippling’s real flex isn’t just unifying HR, IT, and finance. It’s syncing them like a DJ blending three turntables without missing a beat. Payroll talks to device provisioning. Benefits tie into app access. Expense tracking hooks into onboarding. All wrapped in their not-so-secret weapon, Unity, a middle ware layer that makes every employee record the single source of truth, whether you're in San Francisco, Sydney, or Stockholm.
Behind the scenes, the talent stack is loaded. Albert Strasheim (CTO) is engineering Rippling’s tech like a Swiss watch. Matt MacInnis (COO) is scaling ops with calm precision. And Adam Swiecicki (CFO) is keeping the books as tight as the product roadmap. Shoutout to former co-founder Prasanna Sankar, who built the engineering foundation before stepping away in 2021 to launch 0xPPL.
The new capital’s already earmarked: deeper R&D into AI-driven analytics, beefed-up compliance tools, and a hiring spree out of their Dublin HQ, 100+ roles targeting the enterprise expansion game in the EU. Because when you’re playing in a $50B+ HR tech market, with competitors like Deel and Gusto breathing down your neck, standing still is just slow-motion failure.
Here’s the lesson most founders miss: Parker didn’t rebuild Rippling to avenge Zenefits. He built it to outgrow it. He took the scars, found the root cause, fractured systems and reactive compliance, and turned it into a platform where chaos gets absorbed, not ignored.