Prasanna Sankar is an Indian-origin technology entrepreneur whose career has taken him from competitive programming and engineering to building billion-dollar technology companies. Best known as the co-founder of Rippling, Sankar has since moved into the world of Web3 and, more recently, AI-powered software development.
From Chennai to Competitive Programming
Born and raised in Chennai, Prasanna Sankar studied Computer Science at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (NIT Trichy). His interest in technology was evident early in his career.
Sankar has described himself as a highly competitive programmer. During college, he was ranked No. 1 in India on TopCoder and became a two-time Google Code Jam world finalist as well as a two-time ACM ICPC world finalist.
These achievements demonstrated something that would become central to his entrepreneurial career: an ability to approach complicated technical problems through logic, algorithms and first-principles thinking.
Experience at Google and Microsoft
Before becoming a founder, Sankar gained experience at some of the world’s biggest technology companies.
He interned at Google in 2006 and later worked as a software developer at Microsoft Canada. These experiences exposed him to large-scale software engineering and the culture of building technology products at global companies.
But rather than spending his entire career inside established technology companies, Sankar eventually chose entrepreneurship.
The Rippling Journey
In 2016, Prasanna Sankar co-founded Rippling with entrepreneur Parker Conrad.
The company’s goal was ambitious: create a unified platform that could help businesses manage areas such as employee information, HR, IT and finance through a single system.
Sankar became Rippling’s Chief Technology Officer and played an important role in building its technology infrastructure. He remained with the company until 2020.
Rippling subsequently became one of the most valuable companies in the business-software ecosystem. Forbes reported that private investors valued the company at $16.8 billion in May 2025.
A Founder Who Went Back to the Drawing Board
After leaving Rippling, Sankar did something that many entrepreneurs find difficult: he started again.
Rather than simply building another version of the business he already knew, he moved toward an entirely different technological frontier—crypto and decentralized networks.
That led to 0xPPL.
Building 0xPPL
Sankar founded 0xPPL, a platform designed around the crypto community and decentralized networks. Public profiles describe it as a decentralized social network for crypto natives.
The company’s broader vision has evolved considerably.
In 2025, Sankar described 0xPPL 2.0 as a crypto superapp for all things on-chain, designed to help users find and manage assets spread across different blockchains, applications and smart contracts.
The problem he identified is straightforward: crypto users often have assets scattered across multiple chains and applications, forcing them to move between different wallets, bridges, exchanges and dashboards.
0xPPL aims to simplify that experience.
From Social Network to Crypto Superapp
The evolution of 0xPPL demonstrates Sankar’s approach to product development.
Rather than treating the first version of a product as the final destination, he has continued to rethink what users actually need.
The newer 0xPPL vision combines wallet functionality, asset discovery and blockchain interaction into a single experience. Sankar has also discussed using large language models to create AI-powered adapters that can interact with open-source blockchain backends.
This combination of crypto infrastructure and AI reflects where Sankar’s interests have increasingly moved.
Entering the AI Era
Sankar’s latest entrepreneurial chapter is connected to Vorflux, an AI-focused software development company.
His current LinkedIn profile identifies him with Vorflux, and recent coverage describes the company as working on AI-powered automation across the software development lifecycle.
The idea is rooted in a major change taking place in software engineering.
AI models are becoming increasingly capable of writing code. The next challenge is enabling them to handle more of the surrounding development process—from planning and testing to code reviews and deployment.
For a founder with Sankar’s deep engineering background, this is a natural area to explore.
A First-Principles Approach
Across his career, one characteristic stands out: Sankar tends to focus on difficult infrastructure-level problems.
At Rippling, the challenge was simplifying complex business operations.
At 0xPPL, the problem was making fragmented blockchain assets and applications easier to navigate.
With AI, the opportunity is to rethink how software itself is built.
The industries are different, but the underlying philosophy is similar: identify a complicated process and use technology to fundamentally simplify it.
More Than a Startup Founder
Sankar’s story is particularly interesting because his foundation is not traditional business education or sales. It is engineering.
Competitive programming gave him a strong analytical foundation. His experience at Google and Microsoft exposed him to large-scale technology. Rippling gave him experience building a billion-dollar enterprise software company. 0xPPL then took him into Web3, while his latest work is focused on the rapidly developing AI ecosystem.
Each chapter has added a different layer to his understanding of technology.
Lessons From Prasanna Sankar
There are several lessons entrepreneurs can take from his journey.
Deep technical expertise matters. Sankar’s competitive programming background became a foundation for his career.
Do not be afraid to start again. After helping build Rippling, he moved into completely different areas rather than simply repeating the same playbook.
Look for fragmented systems. Some of the biggest technology opportunities exist where users are forced to navigate complicated tools and processes.
And perhaps most importantly, keep learning. From enterprise software to blockchain and now artificial intelligence, Sankar has repeatedly moved toward emerging technology.
The Road Ahead
Prasanna Sankar’s career is still evolving.
His work across enterprise software, Web3 and AI places him at the intersection of several of the biggest technology trends of the current decade.
Whether the next breakthrough comes from decentralized applications, AI agents or autonomous software development, Sankar’s track record suggests that he is likely to remain interested in one central question:
How can technology make something fundamentally complicated feel simple?
From competitive programming in Chennai to co-founding Rippling and building new ventures in crypto and AI, Prasanna Sankar’s journey represents a distinctly modern form of entrepreneurship—one where deep engineering knowledge, ambitious technology and the willingness to start over can come together to create something much bigger than a single startup.
