Merge is a company that offers a suite of unified APIs for the top software categories. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Merge co-founder and CTO Gil Feig to learn more about the company.
Gil Feig’s Background
What is Feig’s background? Feig said:
“I started coding at the age of 12 and haven’t stopped since. It all started with building bots for video games, and next thing you know, I was spending my summers at coding bootcamps, learning anything and everything I could get my hands on. After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in Computer Engineering, I spent several years at LinkedIn and various startups, where I managed and led engineering teams.”
Formation Of Merge
How did the idea for Merge come together? Feig shared:
“Shensi Ding (Merge co-founder) and I both ran into the problem of building integrations at our previous companies. I was working at a recruiting tech company, and we needed very tightly coupled integrations with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSes). Shensi was in cybersecurity, and they integrated with ticketing systems. As our teams built them out, customers continued to request more. The pain of building was slowing both companies down, and we quickly realized that we were running into the same problem.”
“Shensi and I knew then that there needed to be a way for B2B companies to build, manage, and maintain their customer-facing integrations effectively through 3rd-party tooling. And since the existing solutions in the market (i.e. embedded iPaaS tools) weren’t addressing this need effectively, we decided to address it ourselves by building Merge.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Feig’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Feig reflected:
“While we’re split between SF and NYC, our annual holiday parties and offsites are a chance for us all to come together, bond, and reflect on just how far we’ve come.”
Core Products
What are Merge’s core products and features? Feig explained:
“We offer a suite of unified APIs for the top software categories. These include CRM, HRIS, ATS, ticketing, accounting, file storage, and marketing automation (and this list is growing quickly).”
“We also offer Integration Observability features, like automated issue detection and fully-searchable logs, to help customer-facing teams support their clients’ integrations. And we provide integration maintenance on our clients’ behalf (via our team of partner engineers).”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Feig faced in his sector of work recently? Feig acknowledged:
“We have many copycat players in the unified API space. They’ve tried to adopt similar, if not identical, messaging as ours and have tried to undercut us on pricing.”
“Many of these vendors haven’t actually done the work of building performant integrations and they don’t provide the maintenance support and management features that companies need for their integrations. As a result, these unified API players are experiencing low adoption and high churn; we’ve even seen a few go out of business already.”
Customer Success Stories
What are some of the company’s customer success stories? Feig cited:
“Drata, a top-ranking compliance automation platform, needed to offer integrations with cloud services, developer tools, HRIS, ticketing, device management, and more to gather evidence for compliance posture. However, based on their early experience in building integrations in-house, they knew that they needed to find a scalable approach to building, maintaining, and managing their integrations.”
“Drata decided to adopt Merge and, in a matter of weeks, were able to add 30+ HRIS, SCIM directory, and ticketing integrations to their product. Through these integrations and Merge’s Integrations Observability features, they have unlocked additional sales, increased customer satisfaction and retention, and now manage to spend 80% less time on managing integrations.”
Funding
After asking Feig about the company’s funding information, he revealed:
“Merge has raised about $75 million and is currently a Series B company.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Merge from its competition? Geig affirmed:
“There are a few items worth highlighting: We cover many popular software categories to address all of our clients’ integration needs (other unified API vendors tend to support just 1 or 2 categories).”
“We also provide maintenance support and management tooling, which, taken together, help us provide more reliable integrations for clients than our competitors. We continue to lead the industry in integration quality.”
“Finally, we offer advanced features, like Field Mapping and Authenticated Passthrough Request, that allow our customers to access any objects and fields from their clients’ 3rd-party systems. Our competitors typically don’t provide this level of flexibility, and, as a result, their integrations can only access a limited set of data.”
