The funding landscape may have changed in recent months, but startups with strong fundamentals can still raise money. Startup, a services startup focused on HR, payroll and accounting (among others), announced today that it has raised a $55 million Series B round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors NEA and Addition. The merger has now raised a total of $75 million.
Speaking of fundamentals, Synergy also announced today that its ARR has grown 30x over the past 12 months. More than 2,500 companies now use the service to integrate their SaaS applications, including the likes of TripActions, Ramp, Drata, AngelList, Deed and Apollo. And while Merge didn’t disclose its current valuation, the company said its valuation has increased by 4x in this new round.
Merge teams in SF and NYC.
“Our goal has always been: if a company needs to build integrations, many companies don’t build and maintain servers in-house and wouldn’t even consider doing it in-house,” said Shenxi Ding, founder of Merge. “With additional category expansion, we’ve been working on multiple avenues across all existing categories as well as landing bigger brands.”
Launched last year in 2020, the company has expanded its integration support from HR, recruitment and payroll systems to CRM tools as well as project management and ticketing systems.
“We’re seeing existing customers expand and add more combinations and categories, but we’re also seeing new customers coming in, attracted by the new verticals,” Merge founder Gil Fay told me. “One of those constants is generally the main selling point and you buy some of them – and some people are going to want all of these from the beginning.”
Image Credits: Merge
And while the company is starting to attract larger enterprise customers—in part through an expanded list of supported categories, but also because of its increased investment in the go-to-market organization—the integration team is still betting big on small and medium-sized businesses. . For them, Merge is launching an expanded free tier this week. Under this new plan, companies can now offer integrations for free to their first customers before moving to a flat monthly fee for the next 15 customers.
Image Credits: Merge
With offices in San Francisco and New York, Merge increased its staff from 15 to 55 last year. In addition to expanding its go-to-market team and adding new categories to the unified API, Merge plans to expand its enterprise offerings.
“Merge’s standout for us, despite the weak fundraising environment, is how much value the product brings to their customers: Merge’s customers are tremendous fans,” said Ben Fletcher, an Accel partner on Merge’s board of directors. “We are excited about the unified API market to address the long-standing misunderstanding of SaaS companies building product integrations. Synergy’s commercial success so far is a testament to the quality of their products and the support they provide to their customers.
