DryMerge promises to connect apps that normally don't talk to each other — and when it works, it's great
DryMerge, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is building a platform that taps AI to generate automation workflows across different apps.
Platforms to connect apps that wouldn’t normally talk to each other have been around for a minute (see: Zapier). But they have not gotten dramatically simpler to use if you’re nontechnical. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry somewhat. However, getting the most out of these platforms — and fixing things when they break — still requires a bit of programming know-how.
Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Frazer perceived this to be the case as well. During internships at tech giants like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to get automations working using some of the more popular app-linking tools.
“I’d been dealing with the pain of designing integrations and automations from scratch,” Frazer 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 Frazer, longtime friends who’d been building software together since elementary school, decided to try their hands at a streamlined, easy-to-use app-to-app integration platform.
DryMerge is the fruit of their work. A chatbot for building workflows, DryMerge lets you describe an automation you want between apps — for instance, “Whenever I get an email from a new prospect, ping the team on Slack and add them to HubSpot” — and handles the necessary technical scaffolding.
“Currently, IT departments use complicated no-code tools to automate workflows on behalf of non-IT teams,” Frazer said. “A natural language interface opens up automation to nontechnical people.”
It sounded like a neat idea, a chatbot that can string apps together for you — particularly if you, like me, have spent countless hours wrestling with IFTTT. So, I decided to give DryMerge a go, hoping to replace my old and rickety automations once and for all.
DryMerge’s UI is quite clean and minimalist. It reminds me a bit of ChatGPT; there’s not much to look at besides a text bot. Each new request (e.g., “Text me a summary of my calendar meetings every morning”) starts a new chat session, and these sessions can be revisited at any time from a list on the left-side panel.
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