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Former Rippling Cofounder Prasanna Sankar Raises $15 Mn For Vorflux After 0xPPL Shutdown
Inc42 | July 16, 2026 7:39 PM CST

Former Rippling cofounder Prasanna Sankar has launched enterprise AI software engineering startup Vorflux, raising $15 Mn (about ₹144 Cr) in a seed funding from Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator, Powerset and Alliance. 

The funding round also saw participation from angel investors, including Rippling cofounder Parker Conrad, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. 

The launch comes weeks after Sankar wound down his Peak XV Partners-backed Web3 startup, 0xPPL. 

Vorflux is an enterprise AI software engineering platform that automates the entire software development lifecycle from planning and coding to testing and code review using teams of specialised AI agents instead of a single coding assistant. 

Speaking to Inc42, Sankar said the fresh capital will be deployed towards hiring and expanding the startup’s go-to-market (GTM) efforts. 

Explaining the startup’s vision, Sankar said coding itself is no longer the biggest challenge in software development as AI models have become increasingly capable. Instead, he believes the bottleneck lies in reviewing, testing, and deploying software reliably, which Vorflux aims to automate by running AI agents entirely in the cloud. 

“Most people still code on localhost and are controlling the steering wheel. The future is coding agents running entirely in the cloud,” he said. 

Vorflux is based in San Francisco, with most of its employees in Bengaluru.

Peak XV Doubles Down On Sankar 

Explaining the rationale for the investment, Peak XV Partners principal Aakash Kapoor said that as AI transforms software development, the bottleneck is rapidly shifting from generating code to reviewing, validating and shipping it reliably

“We believe the next generation of software engineering will be powered by autonomous multi-agent systems that can orchestrate the entire development lifecycle, not just write code,” he added. 

Kapoor said Vorflux is building a model-agnostic platform capable of tackling complex, long-horizon engineering tasks with “exceptional quality”, creating the infrastructure needed for AI-native software development.

Unlike AI coding assistants that primarily generate code, Vorflux deploys specialised AI agents across different stages of software development. According to Sankar, the platform can understand an application’s codebase, create implementation plans, write and review code, run tests and assign different AI models to tasks based on their respective strengths instead of relying on a single model. 

The startup does not develop its own AI models. Instead, it uses frontier models from multiple AI companies and selects the best-performing model for each task. 

From 0xPPL To Vorflux

Vorflux marks Sankar’s second startup since leaving Rippling in 2020.

Founded in 2022, 0xPPL was a crypto portfolio tracking and trading platform that enabled users to track, discover and trade digital assets across multiple blockchains from a single app.

Besides Peak XV, the startup was backed by AllianceDAO, Anagram, and angel investors including entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, Polygon cofounder Sandeep Nailwal, and Solana cofounders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.

Last month, 0xPPL announced that it was winding down operations after failing to achieve the market adoption it had anticipated. Trading on the platform was disabled on June 6, while the app was shut down on June 30.

Announcing the shutdown on X, the startup said, “We set out to build a super app for onchain. We tried hard, shipped a lot, learned more. The market we bet on did not arrive on the timeline we needed.”

Speaking about the closure, Sankar told Inc42, “We could not make the crypto social network work.”

Prior to launching 0xPPL, Sankar cofounded workforce management software giant Rippling with Conrad in 2016 and served as its CTO until stepping down in 2020. 

With nearly two decades of experience in software engineering, Sankar has also held roles at Microsoft and Zenefits.

Betting Big On AI Software Engineering

Vorflux enters an increasingly competitive market for AI software engineering tools as startups race to automate larger parts of the software development process beyond code generation.

Sankar believes software development is moving towards AI-native workflows, where developers increasingly supervise teams of AI agents instead of manually writing every line of code.

“The ambition is to push the limits of automation – everyone is a manager now. Only now, the workers are AI agents,” he said.

The development comes amid surging investor interest in AI software startups. Indian AI startups raised $676 Mn in the first six months of 2026, more than four times the $162 Mn raised in the year-ago period.

Yesterday, vibe coding startup Emergent entered the unicorn club after raising $130 Mn at a $1.5 Bn valuation, while last month Sarvam raised $300 Mn in its Series B round, valuing the startup at $1.5 Bn.

The post Former Rippling Cofounder Prasanna Sankar Raises $15 Mn For Vorflux After 0xPPL Shutdown appeared first on Inc42 Media.


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