Rippling cofounder Prasanna Sankar unveils Vorflux, raises $15 million

HR software startup Rippling's cofounder Prasanna Sankar has unveiled his new venture, Vorflux. The startup is building an 'autopilot' for software engineering — he calls it his “high-octane Ferrari.”

The company has raised $15 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Powerset, Alliance, and angel investors such as Parker Conrad, Immad Akhund, and Balaji Srinivasan.

"Every AI coding tool still makes you fly the plane. That's the copilot model: you stay in the seat, approving every turn. The models quietly got good enough to fly the whole route, but the tools never caught up. So we built the autopilot," Sankar said in a post on X.



Sankar believes artificial intelligence (AI) models have advanced rapidly enough to take on far more than code generation.

According to him, cloud-based coding assistants can generate code but are unable to run an application's complete environment, forcing developers back to their machines to test and validate changes.

Shifts in software development

Sankar said software development is shifting beyond writing code. He argued that planning, designing, reviewing and executing software will increasingly be handled by AI systems, with engineers focusing more on defining the judgment and principles those systems should follow.

To support this, Vorflux is built around what Sankar calls a "harness" that captures an engineering team's practices and standards. Instead of training its own AI models, the startup uses models from different providers while allowing companies to apply their own engineering workflows across every session.

Removing engineering bottlenecks

The startup aims to automate the entire software development cycle rather than just code generation. It sets up a complete development environment, helps create implementation plans, coordinates code changes across different tasks, runs tests, reviews code using models from different AI labs, and manages code merges.

Sankar also argued that engineering bottlenecks have shifted away from writing code. "Writing code became a commodity. Bottlenecks moved. Every model release, we profile where human time still goes and throw tokens at it until it's gone. Human time is the bottleneck. Tokens are not."

Sankar serves as chief technology officer at Rippling.

He ended his post with a message that sums up Vorflux's approach: "Tokenmaxx, not peoplemaxx."