Following the recent launch in the UK and Ireland, the workforce management platform Ripple continues its ambitious international expansion with the opening of its Asia Pacific headquarters in Sydney, Australia today. The company, which already has 10,000 customers and is valued at $11.25 billion, will invest millions of dollars in its expansion in APAC, co-founder Parker Conrad (pictured above) tells TechCrunch, and already has 30 people in its Sydney office , with plans to hire more for the sales, marketing and product teams.
The last time Rippling hit TechCrunch, it was then raised $500 million in just 12 hours after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The platform combines HR, IT and finance into a single platform, enabling companies to manage their operations more efficiently. One of Rippling’s priorities is R&D and new products created specifically for APAC. In addition to being headquartered in Sydney, Rippling also has an office in India and is now available in Singapore. The next APAC launch will be in New Zealand, with other markets planned. Matt Loop, the former vice president of Asia at Slack, will oversee Rippling’s expansion across APAC as the new vice president and head of Asia.
Rippling’s entry into APAC follows launches earlier this year in the UK and Ireland, where its European headquarters are located. Its Australian clients already include SiteMate, Liven, Omniscient Neurotechnology (O8t) and global companies such as Notion, Anduril and Anthropic.
Conrad says Rippling expects APAC to generate hundreds of millions and eventually billions of dollars in revenue. The company decided the time was right to expand into the region because many of its clients have many employees in countries such as Australia and India. Rippling also noted that Australian companies are willing to spend heavily on software and other technology. Another reason is that there is no local player that combines all the features that Rippling does.
Conrad and co-founder Prasanna Sankar created Rippling because employee data is often stored in different systems that don’t connect to each other, making it difficult for departments to support employees, share information or collaborate. By allowing businesses to manage HR, IT and finance in one place, Rippling makes it easy for them to manage things like policies that apply to different employees, approvals and detailed budget reports.
The home page of Rippling
Conrad says Rippling’s main competitor in Australia is Employment Hero. The Sydney-based company also integrates HR, payroll and benefits functions and, like Rippling, is also aiming for global expansion. But Conrad says Rippling’s advantages include a deeper integration between payroll and HR systems.
“There’s a local provider that a lot of people use and we think we can bring a product to market in Australia that solves a lot of the problems that employers have with Employment Hero, with a native, deeply integrated payroll,” he says. . Another advantage he says Rippling has is that it’s used in 40 countries, making it easier for businesses to pay international employees.
Conrad adds that Rippling will be investing heavily in R&D spending next year and will include “fundamental improvements” to features such as analytics, workflows, licensing, dashboards and expense management.
“These are not just built for Australia,” he says. “They’re built globally to work for every country, but it makes the product dramatically better in Australia too.”
Addressing APAC
Before launching in Australia, Rippling identified several aspects of its platform, especially in payroll and HR. For example, it can handle the Modern Awards or the document outlining the minimum rights Australian employees have from their jobs. Rippling is able to support an employee’s Modern Awards through their HR system for things like leave management, pay and benefits. It also administers superannuation or workplace pensions, tax file numbers and other aspects of employment in Australia.
Another aspect of localization helps employers deal with compliance, especially as regulations and laws change. In Australia this includes the relatively recent Closing loopholes law which, among other things, sets minimum standards for “workers” and creates new definitions for casual workers.
Rippling co-founder Parker Conrad
Conrad says Rippling has already built an underlying system that can handle compliance in new places. For example, the company often enters a new market and discovers that its regulations are similar to those in, say, France or the United States. When Rippling faces new types of regulations, it builds these capabilities further down so it can be adapted for other countries.
“As a result of that, it’s gotten to the point where as we launch into new countries, it’s not that difficult for us to do it,” he says. “A lot of the things we build, we don’t actually need to build. We have to assemble almost like a recipe from the underlying possibilities. So that makes it a lot faster and also makes the system more robust because it means there are already things in Rippling that would take a local company a long time to build.”
Rippling typically works with companies that have up to 1,000 employees, but is now approaching those with 3,000 employees. Its other competitors include Paycom and Paylocity, but Conrad says they only compete in the United States. In Australia, Rippling’s main rival is Employment Hero, but Conrad says its competitive advantages include building a much broader product suite that not only includes an HR cloud, but also a finance cloud that helps with tasks like expense reimbursements and paying bills. On the IT side, Rippling can handle device management, simple sign-on, and help employers manage user provisioning across different applications.
As Rippling scales up in APAC, it will hire a “reasonably large sales team” in Australia to approach companies. It also plans to aggressively grow the rest of its team in Australia.
“Rippling should really feel like an Australian system to anyone using it in Australia,” says Conrad, adding, “In every market we’re looking at what are the things we need to integrate with, what are the ways we automate things like e.g. retirement benefits, payroll, compliance and there it’s all very, very country specific.”
