Axios first reported exclusively (June 25, 2026) that Warp, an AI-native employee management startup, closed a $60 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to $85 million. CEO Ayush Sharma, an MIT-trained ML engineer who ran payroll himself at a previous startup, built Warp to automate the compliance and administrative workflows that have required human operators for 75 years: state tax registrations, multi-jurisdiction filings, new-hire onboarding, and benefits enrollment. For ML practitioners, the architecture is instructive - AI agents handle ambiguous compliance tasks alongside a rules engine, with humans as the last-resort escalation path rather than the primary operator. Warp competes against ADP, Workday, Rippling, Deel, and Gusto, with ARR doubling in Q1 2026 and the company targeting $2 billion in annual payroll volume this year.
Universal agents require universal memory