Platforms that connect apps that don't normally talk to each other have been around for a while (see Zapier), but they haven't always been that easy to use for non-technical people. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry somewhat, but you still need some programming knowledge to get the most out of these platforms and fix any issues that arise.
Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Fraser felt the same way: During their internships at major tech companies like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to get automation to work with popular app linking tools.
“I'd been working on the pain of designing integrations and automation from the ground up,” Fraser told TechCrunch in an interview, “and Sam believed that generative AI models would solve the biggest problem in integration: translating data between APIs.”
So Brashears and Frazer, longtime friends who have been developing software together since grade school, decided to try their hand at creating a streamlined, easy-to-use app-to-app integration platform.
DryMerge is the result of their work: a chatbot for building workflows, DryMerge lets you write the automation you want between apps — for example, “When I get an email from a new lead, notify my team in Slack and add it to HubSpot” — and also handles the necessary technical groundwork.
“Currently, IT departments use complex no-code tools to automate workflows on behalf of non-IT teams,” says Fraser. “Natural language interfaces make automation accessible to non-technical people.”
A chatbot that connects apps seemed like a great idea, especially for someone like me who has spent hours struggling with IFTTT, so I decided to give DryMerge a try in order to completely replace my old, flaky automation.
DryMerge has a very clean and minimalist UI, a bit reminiscent of ChatGPT. There's not much to see except the text bot. Each new request (e.g. “Text me every morning with a summary of my calendar meetings”) starts a new chat session, and these sessions can be re-accessed at any time from the list in the left panel.
DryMerge automation management screen. Image courtesy of DryMerge
DryMerge connects to a growing library of apps, including Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive, social media platforms (such as X), messaging clients (such as Discord), etc. When the platform creates automations with these apps, they are displayed in a dedicated window, showing when the automation last ran and if DryMerge encountered any errors.
I set up some automations that might be useful for a reporter with a packed schedule, like pulling Gmail contacts into a spreadsheet and adding dates from recent email invitations to my Google Calendar. At first, things went smoothly: DryMerge prompted me to log in to the relevant app and asked if I wanted to test the automation to make sure everything was working properly.
But then problems started to arise.
There were a few times when DryMerge's chatbot was completely unresponsive, and other times it missed important details in my requests. I repeatedly tried to get DryMerge to understand that I wanted to copy my Gmail contacts to my Google Calendar, but every time it assumed I wanted to manually enter the contacts into a spreadsheet.
These glitches don't completely ruin DryMerge's experience; to give it its due, the platform is great when it works. For example, I was able to use DryMerge to set up an automation that copies posts from X account to a personal Discord server that I use to aggregate various notifications. A niche use case? Probably, but it could save this reporter a lot of task switching.
Chatting with the DryMerge bot. Image courtesy of DryMerge
Frazer assured me the bugs would be ironed out in time; he and Brashears are the only employees at DryMerge, so there's a lot of work to be done.
“We think we're well positioned to iterate quickly and nimbly,” Fraser said.
Assuming Frazer and Brashears can get the DryMerge platform in good shape, the big challenge they face is maintaining a presence in the fiercely competitive integration platform as a service (iPaaS) space, which is one of the fastest-growing software markets, predicted to reach $2.7 billion this year, according to a recently published study by IDG and TeamDynamix.
AWS has its own iPaaS called AppFabric, and IBM recently acquired iPaaS technology from Software AG. Besides DryMerge, there are a growing number of startups looking to enter the space, and incumbents such as Zapier and IFTTT are aggressively rolling out generative AI capabilities.
Frazer claims that DryMerge's differentiator is that it's “10 times easier to use” than drag-and-drop integration builders, and that will continue to be the case.
“Our users include online fashion retailers, school administrators and asset managers, most of whom have never touched a line of code,” he says. “They use us to save hours a day on a variety of tasks, from automating customer support to data entry for customer relationship management.”
Fraser isn't wrong about the opportunity: According to a survey by IDG and TeamDynamix, 66% of companies say they will invest in iPaaS to address their internal automation and data integration challenges.
“We think there's a huge opportunity for companies to simplify automation and provide easy-to-use tools that can help non-technical people,” Fraser said.
DryMerge is still young and currently has only about 2,000 users, but the company was accepted into Y Combinator's winter 2024 batch and closed a $2.2 million seed round this summer led by Garage Capital, with participation from Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and angel investors that Frazer declined to name.
Fraser said the funding will be used to add new app integrations and double DryMerge's team size in the coming months.