Warp raises $60M Series B
from Battery Ventures.

Today, we're announcing a $60 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Peak XV, Sound Ventures, and Y Combinator. It brings our total funding to $85 million in just under a year. We weren't planning to raise until the fall. The round came together in six days.

It's especially meaningful to have support from people who have built some of the most important technology companies of the last two decades, including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson, Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, former Eventbrite founder and CEO Kevin Hartz, former Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, and Replit founder Amjad Masad.

We're grateful for their support, but the financing isn't the story. It's a story about one of the largest categories in enterprise software, and the last one still waiting to be rebuilt around AI.

Nearly every company in the world relies on software to manage payroll, benefits, compliance, onboarding, employee data, and workforce operations. Human Capital Management is a massive market. Yet despite its importance, much of the category is still built around assumptions that predate AI by decades.

We think that is about to change.

Over the last few years, nearly every major category of enterprise software has attracted a wave of AI-native challengers. CRM has dozens of companies trying to reinvent Salesforce. ERP is seeing attacks on Oracle, SAP, and NetSuite. IT Service Management has an entire generation of startups going after ServiceNow.

Employee management (also known as HCM) is the exception. It is the last frontier, and we believe the most important one.

The category remains dominated by systems built long before AI existed. For decades, Workday represented the gold standard for enterprise employee management, giving large organizations capabilities that smaller companies simply couldn't access. Those capabilities often came with long implementations, specialized administrators, and significant operational overhead.

This led to a tradeoff: smaller companies can access simpler tools with more limited capabilities, while larger companies get powerful systems that are notoriously difficult to operate. As companies grow, they often find themselves choosing between capability and usability.

We think AI changes that equation. Capabilities that once required large deployments and dedicated teams can now live in software that does the work itself. When a company hires in a new state, legacy systems surface the obligation and assign someone a task. Warp registers the account, files the returns, and resolves agency notices automatically. Traditional onboarding platforms generate checklists for IT, while Warp provisions accounts, apps, and devices the moment a hire is made, and deprovisions them when they leave. The same is true for benefits, where elections flow directly into payroll without manual reconciliation. Legacy systems help companies track work. Warp completes it. That's the difference between software you manage and software that manages itself.

That's why we believe AI changes the economics of employee management so dramatically. Companies of any size should be able to access capabilities that were once reserved for the largest enterprises. To put it simply: Workday was built for the last era, while we're building for the next one.

We're seeing a fundamental shift in how the best companies run their people operations. From the fastest-growing AI startups to public companies, the winning teams are running lean: HR, finance, and ops generalists who automate as much as possible, and spend their time instead on the strategic work that AI can't do.

Warp is the platform of choice for these companies. The average Warp customer is growing 5x faster than their peers with a tenth of the HR and admin overhead, something that used to be considered an unavoidable price of scale.

Many people assume payroll is an odd place to start an AI company, but we saw it differently. Payroll, tax compliance, benefits administration, onboarding, offboarding, and workforce operations are some of the most complex reasoning problems inside a business. It's an industry with thousands of jurisdictions and constantly changing regulations. There are real financial consequences when something goes wrong.

When large language models started becoming useful in late 2022, we saw an opportunity. If AI could reliably automate that complexity, it would open up entirely new use cases for employee management software. That's why we spent years solving the hardest problems first.

Today we run payroll, HR, compliance, benefits, and IT on a single platform for companies ranging from 5 to 5,000 employees. What differentiates us isn't the breadth of the platform, but the philosophy behind it.

We've rebuilt each function around the idea that software should do the work, not just help people manage it. Payroll runs in seconds across all 50 states. Compliance agents monitor regulatory changes, register accounts, file returns, and resolve agency notices. Benefits administration, carrier management, and payroll deductions happen automatically. Hire someone and every account, app, and device is provisioned instantly. Offboard them and access is removed just as seamlessly.

Being AI-native isn't about adding a chatbot to existing software. It's about building systems that understand context, orchestrate workflows, and complete work in the background with minimal human involvement.

The thesis is showing up in the numbers:

• Doubled ARR in Q1
• On track to $2 billion or more in payroll volume this year
• Signed enterprise customers with thousands of employees
• Launched two major products back to back: Warp benefits brokerage and Warp Fabric, our AI-native IT automation suite, built in-house

Every company in the world manages people. Every company struggles with administrative complexity. Every company has employees spending time on work that software should increasingly handle for them.

We believe employee management will become one of the first major enterprise software categories to be fundamentally rebuilt around AI. This financing lets us accelerate that vision. We'll invest in deeper AI agents, our tax and compliance infrastructure, an expanding product suite, and even more hands-on support for our customers.

We've grown from 15 people to more than 50 in the last six months, all in person in New York, and expect to reach 200 over the next year. That said, our goal isn't to build the largest organization possible. It's to build a company where AI gives every employee extraordinary leverage. Our team is already remarkably lean relative to what we've built, and we expect that to stay true as we grow. The same philosophy that shapes our product, that software should eliminate complexity and amplify human potential, also shapes how we build Warp itself.

We're grateful to our customers, many of whom are among the fastest-growing companies in the world, including Bland AI, Serval, Campfire, Corgi, Reducto, and Greptile, for trusting us with some of the most important systems inside their businesses.

Our mission is to arm ambitious American companies with Workday-grade power, but with the usability and delight of an Apple product.

The work ahead is ambitious, but that's exactly why we're excited about it. If you want to build it with us, we're hiring.