Rippling

Liquid AI

Rippling

Rippling uses modular pricing — companies buy the modules they need and pay per employee per month. The core platform (employee directory) is the foundation, with add-on modules for payroll ($8/month per employee), benefits, time and attendance, learning management, IT device management, app management, corporate cards, and expense management.

This modular approach means Rippling can land with one module and expand to many. A company might start with just payroll, then add device management when they realize it's available, then corporate cards.

Average revenue per customer grows as companies add modules.

The compound effect is the strategy. Each individual module might not be the best standalone product, but the integration between modules creates value that no combination of point solutions can match.

When your payroll system, IT system, and expense system all share the same employee database, automation becomes trivial.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Rippling

Parker Conrad's origin story at Rippling is inseparable from his spectacular flameout at Zenefits. Conrad co-founded Zenefits in 2013 as an HR platform for small businesses and grew it to a $4.5 billion valuation in two years.

Then it imploded. Regulators discovered Zenefits employees had used software to cheat on insurance licensing exams.

Conrad was forced to resign as CEO in February 2016. The company he'd built was toxic, and his reputation was in ruins.

Most founders would have retreated. Conrad started Rippling in August 2016 — six months after being pushed out of Zenefits.

His co-founder Prasanna Sankar was a former Zenefits engineer. The insight behind Rippling came directly from the Zenefits experience: companies use dozens of disconnected systems for HR, IT, payroll, and finance.

When you hire someone, you set them up in the HR system, the payroll system, the benefits system, the laptop provisioning system, the software access system — all separately. When they leave, you have to remove them from each one individually.

It's a mess.

Rippling's premise was radical: build one unified platform with the employee record at the center. When you hire someone in Rippling, it automatically sets up their payroll, enrolls them in benefits, ships them a laptop, provisions their software accounts, issues a corporate card, and adds them to the right Slack channels.

One action triggers everything. When they leave, one click revokes it all.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Rippling

Rippling's growth strategy is "compound startup" — building many products simultaneously instead of one at a time. Most SaaS companies pick a niche and dominate it before expanding.

Rippling launches new product modules aggressively, banking on the thesis that integration is the killer feature.

The land-and-expand motion works because every module sells every other module. An HR team that uses Rippling for payroll sees that IT device management is available.

The IT team that uses device management discovers corporate cards. Each module is a door to the entire platform.

Mid-market focus (50-2,000 employees) hits the sweet spot — these companies are big enough to need multiple systems but small enough that a single platform is appealing. Enterprise companies have entrenched vendors.

Tiny startups don't need the full suite. The mid-market wants consolidation and Rippling delivers it.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Rippling

Building many products simultaneously means none of them is best-in-class individually. Gusto has better payroll for small businesses.

Jamf has better device management. Brex has better corporate cards.

Rippling's bet is that "good enough across ten categories" beats "best in one." That bet is unproven at scale.

The Parker Conrad factor cuts both ways. His Zenefits implosion is public knowledge, and some investors and customers remain wary.

Conrad has been open about the experience but the baggage is real. On the flip side, the "I failed and came back stronger" narrative resonates with many founders.

International expansion is complex. Rippling's Global product offers employer-of-record services in 100+ countries, but managing local labor laws, tax regulations, and benefits across dozens of jurisdictions is extraordinarily complicated.

Deel and Remote.com are dedicated international employment platforms that may execute better in global markets.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Rippling

Rippling Unity — the core employee data platform that connects all modules through a unified employee graph. Every system shares the same data, eliminating manual syncing.

Rippling Payroll — full-service payroll processing for US and international employees with automated tax filing. Rippling IT — device management (ship, configure, secure, and wipe laptops), software provisioning (manage employee access to hundreds of SaaS apps), and identity management.

Rippling Spend — corporate cards and expense management with policy enforcement built into the card itself. Rippling Global — international payroll and employer-of-record services covering 100+ countries.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Rippling

Founders Fund led the Series A — Peter Thiel betting on Conrad's comeback. Kleiner Perkins and Bedrock invested in growth rounds.

Greenoaks Capital, Coatue Management, and Y Combinator participated. The 2024 round valued Rippling at $13.5 billion, led by Coatue, and a 2025 round pushed it to $16.8 billion.

Notable for being founded by someone investors initially wouldn't touch after the Zenefits scandal.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.