AI Company DryMerge Raises $2.2M In Seed Funding Round
Edward Frazer, a Yale University dropout, and Samuel Brashears, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, formed the company in 2023 and are still the entirety of the workforce
Alex.Haynes
DryMerge, a company founded by two friends who have known each other since elementary school, raised $2.2 million during the company’s seed funding round. Edward Frazer, a Yale University dropout, and Samuel Brashears, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, formed the company in 2023 and are still the entirety of the workforce.
According to a press release, the company’s product streamlines user processes, saving time. “We founded DryMerge about a year ago with the idea that we could use AI to automate API integrations for developers. In that year, our vision got a whole lot bigger —- we realized that we wanted to automate repetitive work for anyone, not just API integrations for programmers,” Frazer wrote.
Frazer continued, “Automating work makes people’s jobs 10x more enjoyable. Thousands of DryMerge users save hours every day automating CRM data entry, support requests, targeted outbound, web research, and so much more. We think what our users are doing is amazing, and we spend nearly all of our time helping them save more time.”
According to the press release, the company received funding from Y Combinator, Garage Capital, Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and Breakpoint Capital. They also received angel investment from Umur Cubuku from Citus Data, JJ Fiegelman from Way Up, Kulveer Taggar from Zeus, and Nate Matherson from Positional, among others.
According to Afrotech, initially, the pair was unsure of their venture‘s future. It took them a while to figure out how to build a product that would be useful for a multitude of users.
“…I’m a pretty young founder –- I dropped out of Yale to build the company, and my cofounder Sam had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin,” Frazer wrote on his LinkedIn page. His early confidence in what they were working on might have bordered on arrogance until he adjusted after receiving feedback.
Frazer continued, “I knew very little about how people worked, what problems they had, or how to solve those problems — and importantly, I didn’t care — I figured it’d be enough to build cool technology and watch the users appear out of thin air.”
Frazer concluded, “It wasn’t until midway through the batch that we realized ‘cool tech’ is a useless value proposition — it took talking to over 100 people from various segments like Customer Success, Support, other Founders, etc. before we had a concrete idea of what people’s actual workflows looked like, and it was only then that we began to build something valuable.”
The pair also were recent participants in Y Combinator’s 38th Demo Day. In its blog post about the event, Y Combinator promises to invest in each company it selects to be part of its YC Winter 2024 Batch for the life of the company. Only 260 companies were selected from over 27,000 applications, which makes the acceptance rate of under 1% one of the company’s most selective. Y Combinator has been increasingly focused on companies that use artificial intelligence to help facilitate practical uses for AI technology and large language models, which perfectly describes the mission and purpose of DryMerge.
According to TechCrunch, when their product works, it creates a lot of ease for users. Although there are sometimes bugs, such as when the platform misunderstands a user’s command or request, the platform still has promise. However, it is one of the latest entries into an increasingly crowded integration-platform-as-a-service market, which is currently projected to reach a $2.7 billion market share by the end of 2024.
Frazer, however, is confident that it can carve out space in the market, even though its current user base sits at around 2,000 users.
“Our users include online fashion retailers, school administrators, and asset managers — the vast majority of which have never touched a line of code,” Frazer told TechCrunch. “They use us to save hours a day on tasks ranging from customer support automation to customer relationship management data entry.”
Frazer continued, “We think a gigantic enterprise opportunity is in increasing the simplicity of automation and delivering easy-to-use tooling that empowers nontechnical folks.”
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