Gil Feig

When Gil Feig was running engineering at Canvas - a diversity recruiting platform later renamed Untapped - his team was drowning. Not in users. In integrations. Every new customer wanted a connection to Greenhouse, to Lever, to Workday. Each one was custom-built. Each one needed to be maintained. The whole thing compounded until they hit a wall: they couldn't add new integrations anymore because keeping the existing ones alive consumed everything.

Simultaneously, across the city, Shensi Ding was fighting the same battle from a different angle - building ticketing integrations at Expanse, a cybersecurity company. The two had been friends since freshman year at Columbia, where Feig served as class president while Ding was VP. They'd kept in regular contact for five years after graduation, meeting without a specific plan. Then COVID hit, and suddenly the plan was obvious.

Two months into lockdown, they quit their jobs. Both were doing fine. Both left anyway. The pain of building and maintaining integrations at every company they'd touched had become, in Feig's words, "so acute that it was just obvious we had to do it."

Before writing a single line of code, Feig conducted 100 customer interviews - not a number he arrived at by formula, but by feel. He'd built warm relationships through LinkedIn, called people up, and asked them to be honest about their integration problems. What he discovered wasn't that companies needed a better integration tool. It was something more specific: the companies who became Merge's best customers were the ones who had already tried building their own integrations and failed. The converts, not the skeptics.

Six months of building. Ten paying customers on launch day. Merge charged from the beginning, which forced the product to justify itself. It did. Revenue grew 30x in the first 12 months. Feig built Merge's entire SEO system in a single night during the lockdown - a network of automatically generated integration landing pages that appeared on Google's first page within weeks.

The pitch was clean: integrate once, reach hundreds of platforms. Instead of each B2B software company maintaining connections to every HR system, accounting platform, and CRM their customers used, they'd call Merge's unified API and get all of them. The engineering time that used to go into building and babysitting those connections could go back into the actual product.

By October 2022, Merge closed a $55M Series B led by Accel - bringing total funding to $74.5M from Accel, NEA, and Addition. By 2023, Feig and Ding were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. By 2024, Merge had 140 employees and was serving more than 4,000 customers across HRIS, ATS, CRM, accounting, ticketing, and file storage categories.

Feig's current priority is AI - not as a buzzword, but as a company-wide mandate. At Merge, using AI tools isn't optional. "It's an expectation that you're going to use AI," he says. "Not just for Merge, but for your own career." His team built Agent Handler, a product that lets AI agents access third-party integrations securely - roughly 90% of it written with AI assistance. His hiring philosophy has shifted to match: curiosity and adaptability matter more than credentials. The engineers who thrive aren't the ones who already know the tools. They're the ones who learn faster.