In 1949, a 22-year-old accountant from Paterson, New Jersey visited a local company and discovered employees hadn’t been paid on time. Why? Because the one person who ran payroll was sick. Without that person, no one knew how to run the calculations to pay people on time.

That accountant was Henry Taub. Taub founded Automatic Payrolls that same year—a payroll-as-a-service company built around a simple promise: payroll shouldn’t depend on any single person. The timing was right. The Social Security Act of 1935 and wartime income tax withholding introduced in 1943 had transformed payroll from simple arithmetic into a compliance function. Many businesses were drowning in complexity, and they didn’t have the tools or expertise to keep up. Taub and his team would spend the next few decades building what we now call ADP.

When the internet era arrived, Chad Richison, a former ADP salesman, who had watched clients complain about manual data entry for years, sold his house and cashed out his 401(k) to build Paycom, one of the first fully online payroll providers. Around the same time, Steve Sarowitz, who had spent two decades inside the payroll industry, started what would become Paylocity, betting that businesses deserved software with the power of an in-house system and the support of an outsourced one.

Each generation of payroll technology founders shared the same profile: deep insiders who lived the pain, saw the next technology wave coming, and built around it. Rippling extended the model into a unified people management suite. Deel turned the employer-of-record model into global infrastructure for remote hiring during COVID. Every one of these companies moved the ball forward by making payroll simpler for employers.

And yet, 150,000 people in the United States still work in payroll operations today.

Why Payroll Is Still Hard

The honest answer is that traditional software and computing were fundamentally tools for automating deterministic workflows. The technology can run the same calculation a million times, but it cannot read an ambiguous government notice, reason through a multi-state tax edge case, or figure out why an employee’s garnishment order conflicts with a recent jurisdiction change.

Those are the jobs that have remained stubbornly human. Though there has been no shortage of effort and desire to automate these processes, the technology simply didn’t make it possible. This is the problem that nearly every payroll company since ADP has faced. And it’s the wall that AI, for the first time, has the potential to break through.

Enter Warp*

Ayush Sharma, an MIT grad and ML engineer, ran payroll himself at his last startup and felt the pain directly, losing hours dealing with state tax filings and other rote work that couldn’t be automated. At the same time, Ayush recognized that LLMs were changing what’s possible in broader workflow automation. So, as he navigated unexpected government notices, new regulations written in legalese that needed to be translated into a filing action, and employment edge cases that fell between the cracks of a rules engine, he recognized that a new platform was needed.

He started with the single most consistent complaint the team heard from the market: issues with payroll tax compliance. A workflow that in 1950 required a human to complete manually still requires a human to complete manually today. Ayush’s team at Warp built AI agents alongside a robust rules engine to automate state tax management and filing—and then kept going, layering in technology to help with health insurance, time-tracking, and device management with AI threaded throughout. The exact tasks that have kept humans in the loop for 75 years were the ones Warp targeted to automate with AI agents.

The result is a unified people management platform. It includes payroll, HRIS, device management, benefits, and more. When a company hires a new employee, Warp’s agents automatically identify the required government agencies, open the accounts, and handle ongoing filings. New employees complete onboarding in under ten minutes with all necessary documentation, direct deposit setup, and benefits enrollment. More importantly, the power of the platform manifests in simplicity for the customer, not additional complexity. Users don’t need to interact with Warp’s AI directly. They just see that previously manual work is completed by the platform. When asked to describe Warp, users reach for the same phrase: “it just works.” For payroll, that’s exactly what the market is missing.

Seventy-five years ago, Henry Taub was amazed that one person getting sick could prevent an entire company from paying its workers. A decade from now, we expect people to look back at 2025 before Warp with the same disbelief Taub felt in 1949.

We’re thrilled to be leading Warp’s $60M Series B financing and partnering with Ayush and the team as they build what payroll and HR were always meant to be. They’re growing fast and hiring across all functions in NYC. If you’re interested in redefining how the world pays and manages its people, please reach out to us or the Warp team!