Platforms have recently emerged to connect apps that don’t normally talk to each other (see: Zapier). But they haven’t gotten much easier to use if you’re not a techie. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry to this field to some extent. However, getting the most out of these platforms — and fixing things when they break — still requires some degree of programming knowledge.
Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Fraser realized this too. While interning at tech giants like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to automate using some of the most popular app hooks.
“I was dealing with the pain of designing integrations and automation from scratch,” Fraser told TechCrunch in an interview. “And Sam believed that generative AI models would solve the biggest problem in integrations — transforming data between APIs.”
So Brashears and Fraser, longtime friends who had been building software together since elementary school, decided to try their hand at a simplified, easy-to-use application integration platform.
DryMerge is the fruit of their labor. A chatbot for building workflows, DryMerge lets you describe the automation you want between apps — for example, “Whenever I get an email from a new lead, send a message to the team on Slack and add them to HubSpot” — and it takes care of the necessary technical support.
“Currently, IT departments use complex no-code tools to automate workflows on behalf of non-IT teams. The natural language interface enables automation for non-technical people,” Fraser said.
It seemed like a great idea, a chatbot that could link apps together for you — especially if, like me, you’ve spent countless hours trying to get a handle on IFTTT. So, I decided to give DryMerge a try, hoping to replace my old, clunky automation once and for all.
DryMerge’s UI is very simple and clean. It reminds me a bit of ChatGPT; there’s not much to see except for the text bot. Each new request (e.g., “Send me a text with a summary of my calendar meetings every morning”) starts a new chat session, and these sessions can be revisited at any time from a menu in the left-hand panel.
DryMerge connects to an expanding library of applications, including Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive, social media platforms (like X), and messaging clients (like Discord). Once you create an automation using these, the platform places that automation in a dedicated window that shows when the automation last ran and whether DryMerge encountered any errors.
I tried setting up a few automations that I thought might be useful for a reporter with a busy schedule, like automating the entry of Gmail contacts into a spreadsheet and adding dates from recent email invitations to Google Calendar. Things were promising at first — DryMerge asked me to log in to the relevant apps and asked if I wanted to test the automation to make sure everything was working properly.
But then, problems started to arise.
Several times, DryMerge’s chatbot stopped responding completely. Other times, it missed key details in the order. I tried repeatedly to get DryMerge to understand that I wanted Copy Gmail contacts to my Google Calendar, but every time I try, I thought I wanted that. Manually Enter contacts into a spreadsheet.
The setbacks didn’t completely ruin my experience with DryMerge. And, to give credit where credit is due, the platform is great when it works. For example, I managed to get DryMerge to set up an automation that copied posts from my X account to my personal Discord server that I use to aggregate various notifications. It may be a niche use case. But it will save this reporter a lot of task switching.
Fraser assures me that the errors will be addressed in due course. He and Brashears are the only two employees at Dry Merge, so their to-do list is long.
“We believe we are well positioned to iterate quickly and nimbly,” Fraser said.
Assuming Fraser and Brashears can get DryMerge up and running, the duo’s biggest challenge will be staying competitive in the fiercely competitive iPaaS space. According to a recent report, Opinion poll According to IDG and TeamDynamix, iPaaS is one of the fastest growing software markets, and is expected to reach $2.7 billion this year.
AWS has its own iPaaS called AppFabric. IBM recently acquired Software AG’s iPaaS technology. A growing number of startups other than DryMerge are trying to break into the space, while established companies like Zapier and IFTTT are aggressively deploying generative AI capabilities.
What sets DryMerge apart, Fraser says, is that it’s “10 times easier to use” than drag-and-drop integration builders — and it will continue to be.
“Our users include online fashion retailers, school administrators, and asset managers — the vast majority of whom have never touched a line of code,” he said. “They use us to save hours each day on tasks ranging from automating customer support to entering CRM data.”
Fraser is not wrong in his assessment of the opportunity. According to an IDG and TeamDynamix survey, 66% of companies said they would invest in an iPaaS to address internal automation and data integration challenges.
“We believe the opportunity for the enterprise giant lies in making automation simpler and providing easy-to-use tools that empower non-technical people,” Fraser said.
It’s very early days for DryMerge, which currently has just over 2,000 users. But the company was accepted into Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort, and DryMerge closed a $2.2 million seed funding round last summer led by Garage Capital with participation from Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and unnamed angel investors, Frazer said.
The funds will be used to add new app integrations and double the size of the DryMerge team in the next few months, Fraser says.
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