Three months after closing a $60 million Series B that brought its total funding to $85 million, New York-based Warp is putting its AI agents directly in customers' hands. On Thursday, September 25, the AI-native payroll and HR startup (not to be confused with the developer terminal of the same name) launched Warp 2.0 and its centerpiece, Warp Agent. The company is pitching it as software that does the operational work of an HR department on its own, from registering in a new tax state to ordering a new hire's laptop, rather than handing people a checklist.
The shift matters because Warp has been running agents for its customers all along. Its compliance agents already filed returns and cleared agency notices behind the scenes. What changes with Warp 2.0 is who is in control. Admins and HR staff can now talk to the agent themselves in plain English, including from Slack, and build their own automations.
"We're taking the AI platform and the agents that we have been building and giving that to our customers firsthand," founder and CEO Ayush Sharma told SiliconANGLE. Customers, he said, can now "go talk to the Warp agent yourself and build systematic workflows based on how your company operates."
Routines, Not Workflow Builders
The core new idea is what Warp calls "routines": jobs the agent owns and runs on a schedule or when an event fires. In the company's own example, a signed offer letter sets off a chain of work. The agent registers the company in the new hire's state, sets up payroll, enrolls benefits and a 401(k), orders a laptop, creates Google and Slack accounts and sends a first-day message. Other routines resolve tax notices and flag payroll variances. Warp also ships ready-made templates, such as a Monday executive report on payroll, compliance risks and hiring.
Sharma is pitching natural language as the replacement for traditional workflow builders, which often need consultants to set up and tend to break when data is incomplete or a case doesn't fit the template. "You can literally take an internal document from the company, upload it and tweak it in plain English," he said.
The company's headline efficiency claim is about onboarding. Warp estimates that high-growth companies spend 10 to 20 hours managing each new hire during their first 30 days. Customers using the agent report that work now typically takes under two hours. In a launch statement, Sharma argued that "much of the work HR teams are tasked with is procedural, repetitive, and high volume," and that automating it gives people teams more time for their people.
Guardrails on the Money
An agent that touches compensation and payroll carries real risk, and Warp has put much of its launch messaging into controls. According to the company's announcement, every agent action carries an identity, a scope, a written rationale and a rollback path. Money movement has hard limits that the agent cannot change. Companies decide, per routine, whether the agent only recommends, acts after human approval or acts on its own. The agent can only access or change what the person it is acting for could. When it hits an exception, it hands the task to an employee or a Warp specialist.
"You can assign exactly the permissions that you want to give the routine," Sharma said. "We give control to the admins and users." An audit trail records who created each routine, when it was approved, when it last ran and when it runs next.
Warp Agent is launching through early access. Every plan includes limited agent usage, with bigger allocations on higher tiers and extra capacity for sale. Plans start at $35 per person per month.
The Money Behind It
Warp announced its $60 million Series B in June, led by Battery Ventures, with Peak XV, Sound Ventures, Y Combinator and HOF Capital taking part. Sound Ventures led an earlier $25 million round. The company says the full $85 million came together in just under a year and that the Series B closed in six days. Sapphire Ventures and Homebrew are also listed as backers. So are founder-angels including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi and former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson.
Warp says it doubled ARR in the first quarter and is on track for more than $2 billion in payroll volume this year. More than 1,000 companies use it, many of them fast-growing AI startups such as Bland AI and Greptile. Headcount grew from about 15 to more than 50 in six months, and the company expects to reach 200 within a year.
Why It Matters
HR software, or human capital management (HCM), is one of the largest enterprise software categories. It has also seen fewer AI-native challengers than CRM or IT service management, a gap Warp's own funding announcement highlights. Sharma is not shy about the target. "We believe we are building what comes after Workday," he said, predicting "a shakeup" as "the AI rebuild is happening for all employee operations."
The bet is that payroll and compliance, with thousands of tax jurisdictions and penalties for mistakes, are exactly where agentic AI has to prove itself, and exactly where trust will decide adoption. Incumbents like Workday, Rippling and ADP are adding AI features. Warp claims a structural edge: a system built from the start for agents to act, not a chatbot added to human-driven software. Rollback, hard money limits and autonomy settings are the price of entry for letting software move payroll dollars.
What to Watch
The early-access label is the key caveat. The 10-to-20-hour onboarding figure comes from Warp's own estimates, and the under-two-hours result is self-reported by customers. How Warp prices agent usage beyond the included allocations, and whether larger enterprise buyers will trust an agent with real autonomy over payroll, will show whether Warp 2.0 is a real category shift or just a strong demo. Also watch how quickly Workday and Rippling respond with agent routines of their own.
“We believe we are building what comes after Workday.”— Ayush Sharma, Founder and CEO, Warp