Building the Unified API with Merge Co-Founder, Shensi Deng
Welcome back to The Room Podcast! Today, we’re thrilled to explore the fast-evolving world of B2B tech innovation with Shensi Ding, co-founder of Merge. Merge has become a leader in unified APIs, creating a category that addresses the challenges many companies face with complex integrations. Shensi’s journey is a unique one — from her coding days in Boston to Columbia, then a career at Silver Lake, all of which prepared her to tackle the ‘SAAS sprawl’ problem head-on. Together with her co-founder, Gil Feig, Shensi has built a powerhouse team and a product that’s essential for clients like Ramp and BambooHR. Their customer-first approach has secured $75 million in funding and a growing presence across SF and NYC.
In this episode, we delve into topics like using customer insights to drive category creation, balancing skills in co-founder dynamics, and navigating fundraising from seed stage through metrics-driven growth.
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T1: How Customer Collaboration Drove Category Creation in Unified API Space
As Shensi and her cofounder Gil began incubating around the pain point of integrations, they were coming at it from two angles. For Shensi, her finance and operations background gave her critical understanding of the P&L impacts. For Gil, the engineering implementation perspective was equally complex for solving the integration problem. The founding team, which worked through covid, spent a long time “thinking about the problem” before starting on any solution. Deng stressed the importance of this investigative time, especially because it was not until onboarding their first customers, that Merge was able to find the right solution. As Merge began working with early partners, Shensi gives credit to this “co-creation” mindset for powering Merge’s product-market fit, demand-generation, and sales motion. Beyond the product validation, Shensi recognizes that the “high bar” which Merge’s earliest customer set — in terms of number of bugs, velocity of production, and overall space — established a lasting company culture that has propelled Merge to be the rocketship that it is today.
T2: Building with Balance as Co-Founders
Shensi and Gil were friends long before they cofounded Merge. What began as a friendship during their freshman year of college, grew into a co-class presidency while seniors at Columbia, and laid the groundwork for a dynamic co-founding team. The balance was crucial to Merge’s founding story, and helped maximize individual strengths while fostering a cohesive, united leadership approach. Shensi, a self-described “jack of all trades”, brought finance, operating experience and a generalist skill set to the operating side. Gil, her co-founder, is an incredibly strong engineer. Establishing these lanes has helped the team with clear task delegation, and also helped Merge tell their founding story and convince investors of their dynamic — all bases-covered — founding team.
T3: Fueling Your Seed Fundraise on Vibes — and Transitioning to a Metrics-Driven Raise
As the Merge team set out to fundraise, the team approached it with the same authenticity and conviction that had defined their early product journey. Recognizing the importance of creating a tangible connection with investors, Shensi and the team invested a full month in crafting a robust demo, understanding that “showing, not just telling” would make all the difference. They didn’t hide in stealth mode, either; as Shensi put it, “nobody cares enough to steal your idea,” so they focused instead on meeting everyone they could, cultivating a presence that kept Merge top-of-mind. This approach turned fundraising into what they called a “debutante ball” — an opportunity to build trust and anticipation, with the mindset that “there are no casual meetings with VCs.” Every interaction mattered, every pitch was meticulously prepped, and the stakes felt high. Reflecting on their journey to $10M ARR, growth at this stage was “blood, sweat, and tears,” with each phase requiring new strategies and constant adaptation. And as Merge looks ahead to scaling beyond that milestone, the team has found truth in the adage that growth only becomes tougher. Yet, as they put it with a hint of humor, “every phase sucks,” each one testing their resilience and shaping Merge’s path forward.
