On the run and hiding out from police in India, a billionaire tech founder turned to X last week to find sympathy and an audience for his tale of a man wronged.
In a saga spanning continents, countries, and courts, the cofounder of Rippling, a San Francisco-based workforce management platform valued at $13 billion, accused his wife of abducting the couple’s only child and engaging in an extramarital affair.
“This is my story,” wrote Prasanna Sankar, who is worth $1.3 billion, according to a recent estimate by Forbes.
But his wife, Dhivya Sashidhar, has her own story to tell — one backed up by hundreds of pages of court documents from their international custody dispute and a trove of emails, photos, and other records reviewed by The Standard. The picture that emerges from these records and from interviews given exclusively to The Standard is of a high-achieving woman who gave up her career for a husband who allegedly coerced her into painful sex and pressured her into accepting an open marriage and patronage of prostitutes; who installed spy cameras around their house and illegally videotaped her daily activities, including in a bathroom; and who dragged her and their young son from country to country, she says, to shield his immense wealth from taxation.
As it stands, Sashidhar is fighting to get her 9-year-old son back as she endures death threats incited by her husband, who shared her email address and WhatsApp number in his viral X thread posted on March 23.
In short, it’s a story about a wife and mother held hostage by her controlling billionaire spouse — “the worst nightmare of my life,” as she put it to The Standard.
A pair of geniuses and a startup dream
Sashidhar met Sankar in 2007, and they started dating two years later. She was the highest-achieving student at their university in Tiruchirappalli, India. He was a programming hotshot, ranked No. 1 in an Indian coding competition when he was 18.
The two dated long-distance while Sankar headed to Silicon Valley, and Sashidhar went to the University of Cambridge on a prestigious scholarship. He raised $7 million for his company Likealittle, a social media platform for anonymous flirting, aimed at college students. It flopped.
In 2013, Sankar reunited with Sashidhar in the Netherlands, where she was working for Shell. The couple were headed for marriage, but Sashidhar was having second thoughts, and her father had expressed concerns about Sankar’s maturity level, according to one of her friends.
“I had never gotten a feeling from Prasanna that he is someone looking for marriage,” the friend said. “Coding, working, creating something — that is what gives him happiness.”
Sashidhar said it was only after Sankar kneeled at the feet of her parents that she felt comfortable with the engagement. The two married in 2013.
Sankar returned to San Francisco in 2015, joining Parker Conrad’s healthcare software startup Zenefits as director of engineering. Zenefits was valued at $4.5 billion before a 2017 Securities and Exchange Commission investigation discovered that it had misled investors. Earlier revelations pointed to a raucous workplace culture, including employees having sex in the stairwells. Conrad resigned. Sankar quit.
The two joined forces again to work on a new software venture. In early 2017, they joined Y Combinator with their startup Rippling, which promised businesses a single platform for running human resources, devices, and finances.
“A lot of my friends in the Bay Area engineering community looked up to [Sankar],” said Sachin Bhat, who also participated in the Y Combinator cohort and would later join Rippling as a director of engineering.
An executive who worked on another team at Rippling called Sankar “a wildly good engineer” and a “coding god.”
In interviews, Sankar has described his time building Rippling as magical. For Sashidhar, however, the move to the U.S. was fraught. Their son was born in 2016, and Sashidhar later claimed in court transcripts that Sankar was “very neglectful” as a husband and father.
“He would come back home, and he would sit with his laptop,” Sashidhar testified. “When he comes, we had a restricted, small amount of time.”
One thing Sankar did have time for was sex, according to his wife. Even as Sashidhar continued to experience pain from complications during childbirth, he repeatedly pushed her for intercourse, threatening consequences if she failed to provide it, she testified.
“Prasanna would come and tell me, ‘Look, sex is a primal need for me. You have to do it. It doesn’t matter, like, you know, how much pain you’re in,’” Sashidhar told the court. “He would literally, like, tell me that, you know, ‘If you don’t do it, then I want to go outside and get it.’”
In a December 2019 email to Sashidhar, Sankar described contacting several escorts to ask for photos and rates, before getting cold feet. “I’m super sorry for the stress this put on our marriage. I promise to never put our marriage in this position again,” he wrote.
In another email from the same day, he asked Sashidhar for an open marriage. Asked about his messages, Sankar told The Standard via email that his marriage was “sexless” at the time, and he “had several conversations with her to understand why this was the case.”
“I once in a moment of anger discussed about opening up the marriage to other sexual partners,” he wrote. “We agreed not to do it.”
In the summer of 2020, Sankar departed from Rippling months before the company raised $145 million from venture investors at a $1.35 billion valuation. Colleagues assumed he was moving on to build his next startup. Yet, for the following two years, Sankar would work little, instead moving his family around the world as he sought ways to hold onto as much of his wealth as possible.
It’s unclear how much stock Sankar was granted when he founded Rippling. Forbes noted his billionaire status by 2022. He reportedly owns an estimated 9% of Rippling.
Rippling CEO and cofounder Conrad did not respond to a request for comment. But a Rippling spokesperson said Sankar “hasn’t been involved with the company for many years.” The spokesperson added that as Rippling grew, the company brought in new leadership, and Sankar voluntarily stepped down to start a new company.
“Regarding the divorce, we’re saddened to see a personal dispute spill over into the public sphere, and hope he and his wife are able to find a resolution soon for the benefit of their son,” the spokesperson said.
Tax dodges and hidden cameras
In 2020, Sankar pitched Sashidhar on the idea of moving to Washington state. Sashidhar testified that Sankar expected the substantial sum of Rippling shares he’d received at the founding of the company to vest and wanted to dodge California income tax.
Sashidhar didn’t want to go but felt she had no choice.
During this time, Sashidhar was working remotely for Microsoft as a senior program manager. She alleged in court that Sankar would pressure her into taking time off work for sex, often at a hotel, reiterating his threat to find other partners if she failed to comply.
Toward the end of their two-year stay in Washington, Sankar pitched another move — this time, to Singapore. When asked in court to explain the rationale for the move, Sashidhar said Sankar wanted to root some of his assets outside the U.S. and transfer his Rippling shares, which were then in his brother’s name, back to himself. Sankar was worried his brother’s new wife could claim ownership of the assets, Sashidhar testified.
“He believed that doing that while he was living in the U.S. would be, you know, attracting the attention of tax authorities,” she said in court. “He wanted to avoid that.”
Sankar acknowledged in court that there were family assets stashed in American Samoa and Saint Kitts and Nevis. He testified that it would be wasteful for the family to pay U.S. taxes, and that this was a reason for their move. Before moving, Sankar switched from a green card to an O-1 visa so he could avoid paying exit tax on unrealized capital gains from Rippling, he testified in court.
Sashidhar didn’t want to move again — especially to another country. She had renounced her Indian citizenship so she could become a U.S. citizen, like their child, as India does not allow dual citizenship. At the time, Sashidhar had the understanding that the couple would be in the U.S. for good, where they dreamed of sending their son to Stanford or Harvard.
Sankar assured her the move was temporary so that he could avoid paying more U.S. taxes.
“Singapore was completely not in the family’s plan, ever,” Sashidhar testified in court. “And it just felt like an abruption to everybody’s life.”
In Singapore, things only got worse. Sashidhar was laid off from her Microsoft job and was unable to work while on a dependent visa through Sankar. He had a tech worker visa and was working on a crypto startup based in India and registered in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven, he testified.
At this time, according to Sashidhar’s court testimony, Sankar would often tell his wife that she was entitled to none of his money despite what she felt were earlier assurances to the contrary.
“When I started off in the marriage, my understanding was that whatever we earned belonged to the both of us, whether I earned it or he earned it,” Sashidhar testified.
While she cared for their son, Sankar fell in with a crowd of high-society hedonists, Sashidhar testified, engaging in “frivolous sexual behaviors with many partners/prostitutes.” Sankar would encourage Sashidhar to have sex with his friends; she refused. It “scared,” “violated,” and “destroyed” her, she testified.
“That was where, like, you know, our marriage broke,” she added.
She remained committed to being a good wife and mother as defined by Hindu tradition, wherein love and sex are less important than family. They went to counseling together, and Sashidhar insisted they test for STDs, as confirmed by a person who knew the couple at the time.
In his X thread, Sankar said that around this time, he became aware of an affair his wife was having with a man named Anoop Kuttysankaran. Sankar posted screenshots of what he said were text messages between Sashidhar and Kuttysankaran in which she allegedly asked him to buy extra-large condoms. Sashidhar told The Standard she believes these messages were fabricated. In court, Sankar’s lawyers described the alleged affair as “emotional” rather than “sexual.”
Then Sashidhar discovered hidden cameras throughout their $20,000-a-month Singapore apartment, including in a bathroom used by their son. Sankar admitted in court testimony to installing the cameras, saying he used them to make sure his wife wasn’t sleeping with anyone else — and to use as evidence against her in future proceedings.
The couple agreed to divorce, but Sashidhar says she refused to sign a financial settlement without consulting an attorney. On Aug. 31, 2024, a physical altercation ensued, in which Sashidhar alleges Sankar punched her in the chest twice. Sashidhar reported the alleged abuse and the hidden cameras to the Singapore police.
“I was very afraid of filing any police reports against Prasanna,” Sashidhar testified. “Like, he has threatened me, always saying that he’s very rich and powerful and that he will destroy me.”
After the confrontation, Sankar left for India and then Kazakhstan. He took their child’s U.S. passport with him. After returning to Singapore, Sankar was cited by authorities for voyeurism over the hidden cameras on Nov. 21, records obtained by The Standard show.
‘Intimate partner violence’
In early October, Sankar limited Sashidhar’s access to bank accounts, sending her into a panic. She received an emergency U.S. passport for her child so they could return to Washington state, where she filed a domestic violence restraining order against Sankar, obtained by The Standard, after arriving Oct. 14.
Sankar filed a stop order to prevent his son from leaving Singapore, which was approved by the courts there — but not before Sashidhar and the boy were out of the country. Their departure triggered application of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, a multilateral treaty that establishes proceedings for the return of children who may have been wrongfully removed from their home country.
The U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington heard Sankar and Sashidhar’s case in January.
Decisions in international child custody cases are dictated by the location of the child’s habitual residence — which the judge determined was Singapore. While the judge believed there was “credible testimony” that Sashidhar had experienced intimate-partner violence at the hands of Sankar, he said there wasn’t any indication that their son had witnessed or been affected by the turmoil in the parents’ relationship.
He later issued a foreboding warning to both parties: “Please know that whatever record that you’re making now and will continue to make going forward will be part of your son’s memory of who you are and what you’re all about.”
Just days after returning to Singapore, the couple moved to India in what Sashidhar alleged was Sankar’s bid to shield his wealth from a divorce settlement. “[Singapore] courts would give the wife 30%-50% of marital assets,” Sashidhar told The Standard. “Prasanna wants to avoid that at all costs.”
India, unlike Singapore and the U.S., does not require the distribution of assets, according to Stutee Nag, an attorney licensed in India and New York who specializes in international child disputes and divorce cases. Sashidhar told The Standard that her husband falsely claimed an Indian domicile to establish residence despite the fact that he hadn’t lived in the country since college.
Sankar claimed on X and to The Standard via email that his true motive for the move was to spare Sashidhar trouble with authorities in Singapore after she took their child to the U.S. Sashidhar denied this.
When they arrived in India, Sashidhar and Sankar agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding, which Sankar posted on X. The two would enter mutual consent divorce in India, with Sashidhar receiving around $1 million, along with $5,000 a month in spousal support.
“I’m not after you for your money,” she said. “Like, I’m educated, right? I married this person when he had nothing.”
On March 3, after Sashidhar left the child in Sankar’s custody, he took their son to an undetermined location in India and has not returned. Sashdihar told The Standard she was supposed to regain custody of the boy March 5.
“He’s a 9-year-old child, for heaven’s sake,” Sashidhar said. “I just really fear that my child is being psychologically affected in this process. The reason I came to India was to settle everything amicably, you know, to make sure that there is no more of this drama.”
Sankar denied many of Sashidhar’s allegations in an email thread with The Standard, claiming he has had no affairs and noting that Sashidhar’s police complaints against him came only after the two decided to separate.
He says he will return their son to Sashidhar so long as the child’s passport is placed in a shared locker, an arrangement he alleges they both agreed to.
“She has made it clear she intends to run away with the child again to the USA,” Sankar told The Standard.
For the time being, Sashidhar has neither her child nor a career. Sankar has both.
“My identity is lost somewhere,” Sashidhar testified in January. “It’s left me, like, scrambling for life.”
Rya Jetha contributed reporting.