DryMerge has raised $2.2 million to make automation easier with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
The company was co-founded by Edward Frazer and Samuel Brashears. The pair, who first met in elementary school, made sacrifices to focus their full attention on the company. University of Wisconsin graduate Brashears walked away from a role at Hive AI while Frazer dropped out of Yale University to pursue the venture, a press release mentions. The founders recently participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2024 Batch startup accelerator program.
“…I’m a pretty young founder – I dropped out of Yale to build the company and my cofounder Sam had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin,” Frazer wrote on LinkedIn. “I knew very little about how people worked, what problems they had, or how to solve those problems — and importantly, I didn’t care — I figured it’d be enough to build cool technology and watch the users appear out of thin air.”
He continued, “It wasn’t until midway through the batch that we realized ‘cool tech’ is a useless value proposition — it took talking to over 100 people from various segments like Customer Success, Support, other Founders, etc. before we had a concrete idea of what people’s actual workflows looked like, and it was only then that we began to build something valuable.”
The founders’ commitment has paid off. Many DryMerge users, the majority of whom aren’t programmers, are now saving hours each day on tasks such as CRM data entry, support requests, targeted outbound efforts, and web research.
“We founded DryMerge about a year ago, with the idea that we could use AI to automate API integrations for developers. In that year, our vision got a whole lot bigger — we realized that we wanted to automate repetitive work for anyone, not just API integrations for programmers,” the press release read.
The two are now poised to make the process of automation even more streamlined as they look to incorporate “plain English chat.” This follows a $2.2 million raise in a seed round. Those who participated in the round include Y Combinator, Garage Capital, Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and Breakpoint Capital, as well as angels Umur Cubukcu (Citus Data), JJ Fliegelman (WayUp), Kulveer Taggar (Zeus), and Nate Matherson (Positional), among others.
