Apron is a platform that allows small businesses to pay their suppliers.

While taking a break at the 51 Mile Marker at the Lake of the Ozarks, Nick Smith was inspired as ever by the coexistence of AI and sales, but was searching for a way to put the controls in the hands of sales executives. “Sales has a lot of ‘enablement’ solutions, but not many tools that sales people actually like using” “Imagine if every sales executive had their own robot that performed virtual prospecting tasks.” Drawing on his sales and management experience at companies like CBS Corporation, iHeart Media and others, he began to imagine sales executives building their own cloud-based robots to reduce repetitive, manual tasks and increase revenue opportunities. Now, he just needed a name that combined sales and AI.

Rippling is a human resource management company that manages employees’ payroll, benefits, devices, and apps. It is a platform that automates manual work, like onboarding new hires. In just 90-seconds, a company can set up (or disable) an employee’s payroll, health insurance, work computer, and third-party apps, like Gmail, Microsoft Office, andSlack. It’s the only platform that truly unifies every employee system, and automates all of the administrative work. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.