The Series B funding round was led by Founders Fund.

Employment management software company Rippling gained the coveted unicorn status after it raised $145 million at a valuation of $1.35 billion in a Series B round. Participants in the Founders Fund-led round included Greenoaks Capital, Coatue Management, and Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Initialized Capital, and Y Combinator also participated in the funding. (Silicon Angle)

Rippling aims to take numerous and duplicative admin functions (“busy work”) out of a business by combining all aspects of onboarding an employee onto its Employee Management Platform. So, the system becomes the one-stop-shop for their employees’ payroll, benefits, devices, cloud apps, and more.

“We like to think of ourselves as a Salesforce for employee data,” Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad told TechCrunch.

COVID-19 provided a “significant growth” opportunity

Commented CEO and co-founder Parker Conrad: “We know there’s never been a more difficult time to run a business. Overnight, companies have had to adapt to a fully-remote world. How do you send a fully-configured laptop to a new employee 100 miles away? How do you easily create, share, and sign all their HR paperwork? Set up their access to all the apps and tools they need, from GitHub and Zoom to Slack groups and Gmail lists?”

“It’s an unprecedented problem that Rippling is uniquely capable of solving, and one of the reasons why we’ve experienced significant growth over the past several months.”

That growth has probably reflected in the startup’s valuation – it’s quintupled since the previous Series A round raising of $45 million in April 2019.

Fund-raising for insurance

Conrad is candid that Rippling raised the money as insurance – just in case the pandemic sent things further south.

Of course, an expansion of the firm’s tech products is already in hand, but he wants to have cash given the uncertain environment.

He said to Forbes: “If there’s a bird in the hand, maybe we should do something today. I have learned that I am really bad at predicting these things.”

As of date, Rippling has raised $197 million.

Conrad Parker lays the Zenefits demons to rest

Parker has been in unicorn territory before when his Zenefits startup became a Silicon Valley darling with a valuation of $4.5 billion.

However, that company ran into problems with the regulators and he had to resign.

Now Rippling too, which he co-founded with Prasanna Sarkar, the former director of engineering at Zenefits, has won its horn.

“I’ve learned a lot,” Conrad said to Bloomberg. The chance to build a second startup is “an opportunity I don’t take for granted,” he said.

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