29. Rippling
Founders: Parker Conrad (CEO), Prasanna SankarLaunched: 2016Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding: $1.8 billion (PitchBook)Valuation: $16.8 billion (PitchBook)Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, low code/no code softwareIndustry: Enterprise technologyPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 1 (No. 14 in 2023)
Workforce management company Rippling aims to combine the numerous systems that manage employees — everything from payroll and benefits to devices and compliance — into a single, integrated platform.
With Rippling, onboarding a new employee can take less than two minutes. That includes setting up email accounts, enrolling in insurance, and issuing work devices. The company targets customers from startups to mid-sized enterprises across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with up to 10,000 employees.
Rippling has been extending the platform's employee management features over the past year. Among the most notable: Talent Signal, an AI-powered tool that analyzes new hires' work and gives managers a second opinion on how they're performing. Rippling also introduced an employee scheduling tool that can customize complicated hourly work schedules based on demand, certifications, and hundreds of other data points. That tool, launched in October, became the company's fastest product to reach $1 million in sales.
But the year wasn't without controversy. In March, Rippling filed a high-profile lawsuit against Deel, a rival in the global workforce space and former Disruptor, accusing the company of corporate espionage. According to Rippling's filings, a former employee acted as a mole for Deel, accessing confidential data about customers, quotes, sales calls, demos and support requests in internal Slack repositories. The company claims he also found and downloaded Rippling's guidance on how to go up against Deel for prospective business, according to the legal filing.
In response, Deel recently unleashed its own allegations of bad behavior by Rippling.
Despite the legal drama, Rippling has continued to grow, with annual revenue increasing at a rate of more than 30%. The company raised $450 million in a recent fundraising round, and committed to buying an additional $200 million worth of shares from current and previous employees — a morale-boosting move amid continued layoffs in tech and many sector valuations that haven't recovered since the startup downturn of 2022-2023. Rippling has not had recent layoffs and the latest round of funding saw its valuation rise by more than $3 billion.
The company also opened new offices: a new European headquarters in Dublin; its first Asia Pacific office in Sydney; and moved into a new office in San Francisco.
In a market fragmented by numerous niche solutions, Rippling is betting that its all-in-one approach will allow it to outmaneuver Deel and other startups, as well as incumbents ADP and Paychex.
CEO Parker Conrad told CNBC in a May interview that he thinks the legal drama with Deel may be helping it win more business.
"I think it's too early to say, looking at the data, how all of this is going to evolve from a market perspective, but certainly we see some companies that have said, 'Hey, we're talking to Rippling because of this,'" Conrad said.
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More than anything since, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 altered defense calculations for Europe, pushing several countries to meet the 2 percent threshold and prompting Sweden and Finland, after decades of neutrality, to join the alliance. With the war ongoing and Trump back in office, the increased spending commitments are at least as much about Europe's long-term defense as they are appeasing the unpredictable Trump. In his speech this week at London's Chatham House, Rutte began to publicly lay out NATO's new capability targets — the amount of military equipment needed to implement a defense plan against a potential Russian attack — that defense ministers agreed to earlier this month. The alliance, Rutte said, needs 'a 400 percent increase in air and missile defence … thousands more armored vehicles and tanks, millions more artillery shells, and we must double our enabling capabilities, such as logistics, supply, transportation, and medical support.' Over time, that will lead to Europe carrying more of the burden for its own defense — and having more sway within the alliance. 'You now have a road map for Europeanizing NATO that you never had before, and that ultimately will lead to a more successful alliance,' Daalder said. 'Everybody wants to move in that direction, the U.S. and the Europeans.' Trump has long groused that the U.S. shoulders too much of the cost for defending the world and has pushed more than just NATO members to increase their defense budgets. The administration is also pressuring Japan, a non-NATO ally pursuing a new trade deal with Washington, to boost its defense spending significantly with the Pentagon describing the 5 percent benchmark as a new 'global standard.' It's a standard many countries may struggle to reach. 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