Rippling Co-Founder Launches Vorflux With $15M for Autopilot Coding

SAN FRANCISCO: Prasanna Sankar, co-founder and former CTO of Rippling, launches Vorflux with $15 million in seed funding.

Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Powerset, and Alliance back the round, announced July 18. The angel list carries a story of its own. Parker Conrad, who built Rippling with Sankar from 2016, invests in his old partner’s new company. Mercury’s Immad Akhund and Balaji Srinivasan join him.

Vorflux pitches itself as an autopilot for software engineering, and Sankar is blunt about the distinction. “That’s copilot. You’re still flying the plane,” he wrote of existing AI coding assistants. Autopilot means setting a destination and letting the system fly the route.

In practice, Vorflux agents plan development work, build software, run tests, and open pull requests on dedicated cloud machines. The platform sets up frontend, backend, databases, and mobile services before building a requested feature. It validates its own work in a browser. Then, in a nice touch of institutional paranoia, it has a model from a different provider review the code before any pull request opens.

Vorflux builds no models of its own. It routes tasks across several providers based on capability, wrapped in what Sankar calls a harness that applies each engineering team’s own practices. The performance claims have not been independently assessed.

The launch is also a second act. Sankar’s previous startup, crypto tracker 0xPPL, wound down in June after its market never arrived.

The category he is entering has no shortage of company. Emergent just hit unicorn status selling AI coding to small businesses. Chamath Palihapitiya’s 8090 raised $135 million for its software factory. Cursor sits at $29.3 billion. Everyone now agrees engineers won’t write most code. The fight is over who supervises the machines that do.