Announcing our $18M Series A

The payroll landscape has shifted dramatically. Post-COVID, 50% of startups now hire across multiple states from day one—up 3x since 2019. While legacy providers like ADP, Gusto, and Rippling offer similar payroll features, they all break down under multi-state complexity.

We're not selling another payroll platform. We're selling time back to founders. When you hire someone on Warp, it takes 30 seconds. Behind the scenes, our AI agents handle everything else—tax registrations, unemployment setup, workers' comp, quarterly filings, and resolving those dreaded tax notices that used to consume weeks of founder time.

This is our wedge: turning the most painful part of scaling (multi-state compliance) into a completely automated experience. Once we own this workflow, we become indispensable to every growing startup.

Our customers grow 200%+ by month 10 and stick with us because payroll plus compliance creates the strongest possible moat. As they scale, they buy more Warp—expenses, time tracking, contractor management, benefits administration.

We've already built more features than Gusto in 1.5 years versus their 12+ years. Our next wave: Okta SSO, app provisioning, org charts, employee profiles, compensation benchmarking. All shipping in the next 6 months.

Our advantage? An engineering-first team building with AI. While competitors rely on large manual ops teams, we're 10x more productive with Claude and Cursor. We ship features, not overhead.

Our end game: the first back-office platform that actually runs itself. No manual workflows. No human bottlenecks. No scaling limits.

While others digitize paperwork, we're building AI-first systems that think, decide, and execute. Starting with the hardest problem—multi-state tax compliance—we're establishing Warp as the automated system of record for all startup operations.

Two parallel execution tracks: (1) AI automation of complex, manual processes that don't scale, and (2) building the most polished, fast, intuitive HR platform that founders actually love using. Both are required to win.

50% of new startups now have employees across multiple states from day one (up 3x since 2019). States are competing for tax revenue with harsher penalties and more complex regulations. The average startup navigates 4+ state jurisdictions instead of 1-2.

Legacy payroll providers built for single-state businesses are breaking under this complexity. What used to be manageable manually now requires specialized expertise that most startups can't afford or don't have time to develop.

LLMs now parse complex tax notices and regulations with 99%+ accuracy. For the first time, AI agents can navigate thousands of government portals and automate workflows that previously required paralegals and tax experts.

Our results prove the threshold has been crossed: filing time dropped from days to 5 minutes, error rates fell from 10% to under 2%, and costs decreased from $500-1000 per filing to under $10. We handle 380 businesses with one part-time contractor while Gusto employs 30% of their team in compliance and ops.

Banking APIs like Unit and Bond let us spin up payroll accounts in days, not months. Tax engines from Avalara opened previously closed systems. Direct deposit networks are now accessible through modern APIs.

Instead of spending 18-24 months building financial plumbing, we focus on AI-powered automation and user experience. Incumbents built moats on infrastructure access, but that advantage is gone. Product quality is the only differentiator left.

Founders using Superhuman, Linear, and Figma won't tolerate HR software that feels like JIRA circa 2015. They expect delightful, fast, intuitive tools designed for power users, not clunky interfaces with endless confirmation dialogs.

This expectation gap is our opportunity. Modern founders want to run payroll in 30 seconds, onboard employees in 2 minutes, and never think about tax filings. When you deliver that experience, the decision is obvious.

Point solutions like Mosey and Discern exist, but founders need one platform that handles compliance + HR + payroll together. Switching between tools wastes time and creates compliance gaps.

Our AI agents do everything automatically: open tax accounts across jurisdictions, set up unemployment insurance, provision workers' comp, file new hire reports, make quarterly tax payments, update business filings when employees move, and issue year-end W-2s correctly across complex multi-state setups.

Full payroll support across all 50 US states plus global contractors in 150+ countries. Autopay and invoicing workflows eliminate manual processes that waste founder time every pay cycle.

Send offer letters and NDAs in 30 seconds. Employees complete everything on one platform: personal info, legal documents, offer letter signing, benefits enrollment, and 401(k) setup. From SSN to t-shirt size, we collect everything in minutes, not hours.