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Merge sells a single unified API that lets software companies connect to many different HR, payroll, accounting, and CRM systems without building each connection themselves.
Merge is a software company that sells one connection to replace dozens. B2B software companies — the ones building HR tools, finance apps, recruiting platforms — constantly need to pull data from their customers' payroll, HR, accounting, and CRM systems. Each of those systems (think Workday or Salesforce) has its own quirks, logins, and data formats. Merge gives developers one API that plugs into all of them, so they build the integration once and get every provider underneath.
The way it works is simple in concept. A company's customer connects their payroll or HR account through Merge, and Merge handles the messy translation — pulling out employee records, pay data, invoices, or customer lists in one clean, standardized format. Instead of spending engineering months building and maintaining dozens of separate integrations, the software company writes one integration to Merge and gets the whole menu. Customers choose Merge because integrations are a grind: each one breaks, each one needs upkeep, and no startup wants its best engineers stuck babysitting them. Merge sells to other software companies, not to the payroll providers themselves. Its customers are the builders of HR, finance, and CRM products who need their apps to talk to whatever systems their buyers already use. The company is based in San Francisco and is privately held, backed by venture investors. It sits in a crowded field of "integration infrastructure" players, but its pitch is breadth across a few key categories rather than depth in just one.
The honest risk is that this is a useful but replaceable layer. Big software platforms can build their own connectors, and some customers will always prefer a direct integration they control. Merge's bet is that most companies would rather buy the plumbing than build it — and that as the number of systems multiplies, one clean pipe becomes more valuable, not less.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026