We are excited to announce our investment in Merge, a unified API that standardizes how developers build and scale integrations. 

When our team first met Merge’s co-founders, Shensi Ding and Gil Feig, over two years ago, we were struck by their commitment to integrations. Their passion is for good reason: integrations are a necessary part of building software today. Whether a burgeoning startup or an established enterprise, integrations are needed so a business’s products can interact with a growing ecosystem of third-party software vendors. But building, maintaining, and scaling these integrations comes with common problems: non-uniform data fields, unexpected API changes, and an ever-growing list of integrations customers need. Many times, after all the work and developer resources have been put into these projects, the integrations don’t work, don’t scale, or the data is wrong. And for highly fragmented categories, like ATS, Accounting, CRM, HRIS, ERP, and Ticketing, this amount of time (and related six-figure salary costs) can add up very quickly. This pain point is felt universally – we have heard it from our own portfolio, but it’s also difficult to ignore the frequency with which integrations are mentioned in the public filings of large tech businesses: 

How Merge Built a Category-Defining Unified API

Shensi and Gil built Merge to solve this ever-complex and ever-important problem of integrating with hundreds of software companies. They spent over two years building their back-end tooling to allow them to add and maintain integrations faster than anyone else in the market – today they’re at 150 integrations and counting. It all happens through one API, with a standardized data model that makes it easy for developers to pull in the fields they need, push and pull data between systems, and create a seamless end-user experience, all without having to worry about the maintenance of APIs and endpoints – saving countless developer hours. Given the time and resources saved, it is no surprise Merge’s customers are singing the praises of the product – Ramp, TripActions, Gem, Apollo.io, AngelList, KornFerry, and Drata, are a few of many who rely on Merge for their integrations.

The best founders that we work with are extremely opinionated about how they are going to build a category-defining company. Shensi and Gil have architected the platform from day one to allow them to scale the company to multiple verticals and truly offer a horizontal platform for managing integrations. Shensi and Gil have also fostered a special culture – a team that enjoys working together in person every day, and a company that cares about its employees and customers above all else. This commitment has paid off; Merge is growing extraordinarily quickly while remaining financially and operationally disciplined, something that is not easy to do. 

At Accel, developer tools are a core focus – from our first APX conference in 2015 to our most recent DX conference this past July. Over the years at Accel, we’ve been fortunate to partner with and learn alongside some of the best developer tools and products offered through API: Atlassian, Algolia, Braintree, Checkr, MessageBird, Segment, Scale, Sentry, and Snyk among many others. We could not be more excited to welcome Shensi, Gil, and the rest of the Merge team to the Accel family. We believe they are building something extremely special, and we are excited to partner as Merge reshapes the way the world integrates.