Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar launches AI startup Vorflux with $15 million funding

Prasanna Sankar, the co-founder and former chief technology officer of HR software company Rippling, has launched an AI startup called Vorflux.

The company has announced $15 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Powerset and Alliance.

Angel investors Parker Conrad, Immad Akhund and Balaji Srinivasan also participated in the round.

Vorflux describes itself as a cloud-based platform that provides an “autopilot” for software engineering.

The startup said its AI agents can plan development work, build software, run tests and open pull requests on dedicated machines.

Sankar said existing AI coding assistants still required engineers to supervise much of the process, including reviewing results and correcting their output.

“That’s copilot. You’re still flying the plane. Autopilot is the level above: set the destination, it flies the whole route,” he said in a LinkedIn post.

According to Sankar, Vorflux can set up different parts of an application, including its frontend, backend, databases and mobile services, before building and testing a requested feature.

He said the platform could validate its work in a browser and use an AI model from a different provider to review the code before opening a pull request.

The company’s claims about the platform’s performance have not been independently assessed.

Vorflux does not develop its own AI models. Instead, Sankar said it uses models from several providers and assigns them to tasks based on their capabilities.

The company also configures what it calls a “harness”, which applies an engineering team’s practices and workflows when its AI agents perform development tasks.

The launch follows the closure of 0xPPL, Sankar’s crypto portfolio tracking and trading platform.

The company said in June that it was winding down after the market it had expected failed to develop within the required timeframe.

Sankar co-founded Rippling with Parker Conrad in 2016 and served as its chief technology officer until leaving the role in 2020.