Platforms to connect apps that wouldn’t normally talk to each other have been around for a minute (see: Zapier). But they have not gotten dramatically simpler to use if you’re nontechnical. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry somewhat. However, getting the most out of these platforms — and fixing things when they break — still requires a bit of programming know-how.

Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Frazer perceived this to be the case as well. During internships at tech giants like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to get automations working using some of the more popular app-linking tools.

“I’d been dealing with the pain of designing integrations and automations from scratch,” Frazer told TechCrunch in an interview. “And Sam believed that generative AI models would solve the biggest problem in integrations — transforming data between APIs.”

So Brashears and Frazer, longtime friends who’d been building software together since elementary school, decided to try their hands at a streamlined, easy-to-use app-to-app integration platform.

DryMerge is the fruit of their work. A chatbot for building workflows, DryMerge lets you describe an automation you want between apps — for instance, “Whenever I get an email from a new prospect, ping the team on Slack and add them to HubSpot” — and handles the necessary technical scaffolding.

“Currently, IT departments use complicated no-code tools to automate workflows on behalf of non-IT teams,” Frazer said. “A natural language interface opens up automation to nontechnical people.”

It sounded like a neat idea, a chatbot that can string apps together for you — particularly if you, like me, have spent countless hours wrestling with IFTTT. So, I decided to give DryMerge a go, hoping to replace my old and rickety automations once and for all.

DryMerge’s UI is quite clean and minimalist. It reminds me a bit of ChatGPT; there’s not much to look at besides a text bot. Each new request (e.g., “Text me a summary of my calendar meetings every morning”) starts a new chat session, and these sessions can be revisited at any time from a list on the left-side panel.

DryMerge hooks into an expanding library of apps, including Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive, social media platforms (e.g., X), and messaging clients (e.g., Discord). Once the platform creates an automation with these, it plops that automation into a dedicated window showing when the automation last run and whether DryMerge encountered any errors.

I tried setting up a few automations I thought might be useful for a reporter with an overfull schedule, like one to throw Gmail contacts into a spreadsheet and add dates from recent email invitations to a Google Calendar. Things started out promising — DryMerge had me log into the relevant apps and asked whether I’d like to test the automations to ensure everything was working properly.

But then, problems started to crop up.

Several times, DryMerge’s chatbot stopped responding altogether. Other times, it missed key details in a request. I tried repeatedly to get DryMerge to understand that I wanted to copy Gmail contacts to my Google Calendar, but every attempt, it thought I wanted to manually enter contacts into a spreadsheet.

The setbacks didn’t completely ruin my DryMerge experience. Giving credit where it’s due, the platform’s nifty when it works. For example, I successfully got DryMerge to set up an automation that copies posts from my X account to the personal Discord server I use to aggregate various notifications. A niche use case? Perhaps. But it’s going to save this reporter a lot of task switching.

The bugs, Frazer assures me, will be addressed in time. He and Brashears are DryMerge’s only employees, so there’s lots on the to-do list.

“We think we’re well-positioned to iterate quickly and nimbly,” Frazer said.

Assuming Frazer and Brashears can get DryMerge’s platform in good working condition, the bigger challenge the duo will have to face is staying relevant in the fiercely competitive integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) space. According to recent poll released by IDG and TeamDynamix, iPaaS is one of the fastest-growing software markets, projected to reach $2.7 billion this year.

AWS has its own iPaaS called AppFabric. IBM recently acquired iPaaS tech from Software AG. A growing number of startups aside from DryMerge are attempting to break into the segment, while incumbents like Zapier and IFTTT are aggressively deploying generative AI capabilities.

Frazer makes the case that DryMerge’s differentiator is — and will remain — “being 10x easier to use” than drag-and-drop integration builders.

“Our users include online fashion retailers, school administrators, and asset managers — the vast majority of which have never touched a line of code,” he said. “They use us to save hours a day on tasks ranging from customer support automation to customer relationship management data entry.”

Frazer’s not wrong about the opportunity. Per the IDG and TeamDynamix poll, 66% percent of companies said that they’ll invest in iPaaS to address internal automation and data integration challenges.

“We think a gigantic enterprise opportunity is in increasing the simplicity of automation and delivering easy-to-use tooling that empowers nontechnical folks,” Frazer said.

It’s very early days for DryMerge, which only has around 2,000 users at present. But the company was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and DryMerge this past summer closed a $2.2 million seed round led by Garage Capital with participation from Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and angels whose names Frazer wouldn’t reveal.

Frazer says that the funds are being put toward adding new app integrations and doubling the size of DryMerge’s team in the next few months.