Merge

Inside every modern software company there is a quiet battle happening behind the product roadmap. It is not about features, design, or pricing strategy. It is about integrations. The moment a company starts selling serious software into serious organizations, the requests begin stacking up. Connect to this HR system. Sync with that accounting platform. Plug into another CRM. What looks like a simple checkbox from the buyer’s seat often becomes months of engineering work behind the scenes. That tension sits right at the center of today’s SaaS economy, and it is exactly where Merge planted its flag in 2020.

Merge was founded by Columbia University classmates Shensi Ding and Gil Feig, two computer science students who had already spent years working together before building a company. At Columbia they served as Class President and Vice President of the Columbia Engineering Student Council. The partnership continued after graduation in San Francisco, where both founders stepped into early stage startups and quickly encountered the same operational bottleneck. Integrations were not side projects. They were the silent gatekeepers of enterprise deals.

Shensi Ding saw the problem up close while serving as Chief of Staff at Expanse, the cybersecurity platform later acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Enterprise customers consistently asked for integrations with their existing systems, and engineering resources were diverted away from core product development just to keep up with those demands. Gil Feig experienced the same strain as a founding engineer and Head of Engineering at Jumpstart, later rebranded Untapped. Integrating with platforms like Greenhouse consumed time that product teams desperately needed elsewhere. What started as conversations over weekly dinners slowly turned into a shared realization that the integration problem stretched across the entire SaaS landscape.

Merge became the response. The company built a unified API platform that allows developers to integrate once and connect to dozens of systems across categories such as HRIS, applicant tracking systems, accounting platforms, and CRM software. Instead of engineering teams rebuilding connectors from scratch each time a customer requests another integration, Merge standardizes the process through a shared data model that manages authentication, syncing, and maintenance in the background. The surface simplicity hides extremely complex infrastructure work, but that complexity is exactly what makes the platform valuable.

The market moved quickly once the signal became clear. Merge has raised $75M in total funding, including a $15M Series A led by Addition and a $55M Series B led by Accel with participation from NEA and Addition. In the 12 months following the Series A, the company reported 26x growth in annual recurring revenue. Today more than 7,000 companies rely on Merge, including customers such as Calendly, Gong, TripActions, and AngelList. Recognition followed the traction with Merge appearing on the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups list and earning G2 Leader status in the unified API category while both founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

The deeper signal sits beneath those milestones. As enterprise software buyers increasingly expect tools to integrate seamlessly with the rest of their stack, integrations have shifted from optional features to core product requirements. That shift places enormous pressure on engineering teams across the SaaS sector. Platforms like Merge change the math by turning integration work from a recurring engineering burden into shared infrastructure.

The company continues expanding into new system categories while scaling the platform beneath thousands of software products. For builders operating inside modern SaaS, the conversation around integrations is evolving from “How do we build this?” to “Why build it at all?” Merge is positioning itself squarely in the middle of that shift as the connective layer quietly powering the next generation of software companies.