Merge

Gil Fai had been a software engineer at LinkedIn and Wealthfront before joining Canvas (now Untapped), a diversity recruiting platform. At Canvas, he led the engineering team and ran directly into a painful problem: building and maintaining integrations with dozens of ATS (Applicant Tracking System) platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday. Meanwhile, his best friend and future co-founder Shen-Ci was experiencing the exact same pain at a cybersecurity company, where she had to build ticketing integrations across multiple platforms as Chief of Staff. When they realized they were solving identical problems in completely different industries, they knew they were onto something real.

Rather than jump in blindly, Gil and Shen-Ci followed the lean startup methodology and spent six months talking to roughly 100 potential customers before building anything. They used their networks strategically, finding mutual connections through LinkedIn and reaching out to product and engineering leaders at companies they thought could use the product. The conversations were overwhelmingly positive—most companies said they had entire teams working on integrations and would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a solution. Only three out of 100 told them to give up. Those harsh rejections stung, but served as reverse validation: if everyone loved the idea immediately, someone would have already built it.

With that conviction, they started building in May 2020, right as COVID hit. Both founders coded—Shen-Ci, who had majored in computer science but never coded professionally, taught herself to become a full-stack engineer in about a month. They focused heavily on design and documentation from day one, believing that just because Merge was an API product didn't excuse poor UX. They also invested early in security (SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) because they knew they'd be handling sensitive HR, payroll, and recruiting data.

When they launched after six months of development, roughly 10-15 of the 100 companies they'd interviewed were ready to pay immediately. They charged from day one (with only a one or two month free beta for a handful of early customers). The onboarding was rough—API integrations are inherently difficult, and because Merge doesn't control what runs on partner systems, they had to be extremely reactive. They learned quickly that building the integration is only 20% of the problem; maintaining it is the hard part. They built processes to solve customer issues within minutes, knowing that their B2B2B model meant their customers' customers depended on perfect execution.

They raised a $4.5M seed round in late 2020 (about four months in), when they still only had a prototype. The strategy was clever: whenever they pitched to a VC, they'd already know which of that VC's portfolio companies they'd interviewed, so they could pop those logos into the pitch deck and let the VC validate with a trusted customer.

In those early days, customer objections fell into two camps. The first was engineers saying, "We can build this ourselves." Gil and Shen-Ci's response was often, "Go ahead, try it." Most came back once they hit the complexity of maintaining edge cases across different customer data formats. To help, they created collateral showing the real dollar costs and support burdens of building integrations in-house, and built tooling in Merge so non-engineers could debug integration issues.

The second objection was harder: "You're a tiny startup. How can we trust you with mission-critical infrastructure?" For the first two years, they couldn't fully overcome this with early-stage logos alone. But they kept telling the story (we're not getting acquired, we're building a real company), kept fundraising to show stability, and kept signing bigger customers who competed with the doubters.

Meanwhile, they invested heavily in automation and organic growth. They built a system that auto-generates landing pages, social media content, and meta images for every new integration they publish. This single automation (which Gil built in one night) became their biggest growth lever. Two weeks after publishing an integration, it often ranked on the first page of Google for searches like "Workday API." Combined with content marketing on integration-related topics, SEO became a massive inbound driver.

By October 2022, Merge had grown enough to raise a $55M Series B, bringing total funding to $74.5M. In the 12 months leading up to that round, ARR grew 30X, driven by both more customers and significantly higher deal sizes as they moved upmarket. They now have 4,000+ customers, 65 employees across New York and San Francisco offices, and revenue in the multiple seven-figure range. The three companies that told them to give up? All eventually signed, after seeing competitors get 10-30X more integrations overnight. That validation—earned through persistence, great execution, and smart marketing—proved the idea was worth fighting for.