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 said 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.

Construction companies deal with a lot of documents — so many that it can be difficult to process and manage them all. According to one recent survey, a third of construction professionals found accessing documents to be a challenge in completing a project, while a fourth said that inaccurate project paperwork has contributed to a construction delay.

Sarah Buchner knows this well. Originally a carpenter, she founded a startup, Trunk Tools, that provides automation tools to organize unstructured construction documentation.

“I grew up in a poor environment in a small village in Austria and started working as a carpenter at age 12,” Buchner said. “After many years in carpentry, I switched over to the general contractor side and worked my way up from superintendent to project manager to group leader. My PhD research made me realize that I could have a greater impact on my field by developing disruptive construction technology, and this inspired me to move across the world to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford and get my MBA.”

Trunk Tools’ platform can take in files like PDFs, spreadsheets, drawings, blueprints and tables and answer questions about them in a chatbot-like interface (e.g. “What type of power outlets are in the art studio?”). Trunk Tools can also “link” scheduled construction activities with supporting documentation, attempting to spot potential project issues and surface insights.

“Traditional construction software, like Procore, is centered around documenting workflows and storing data within a predefined system,” Buchner said. “In contrast, we’re introducing a paradigm shift where Q&A and AI enable construction teams to interact with information using natural language.”

Buchner says that for one customer’s $500 million high-rise condo in NYC, there were 3.6 million pages of documentation. Given the amount of time it takes to sort through file folders that massive, it’s not exactly surprising that construction industry workers loathe paperwork.

A poll by Dodge Data and Viewpoint, a construction accounting software vendor, found that only 28% of contractors were okay using paper processes, while just 47% said they were satisfied with spreadsheets. Seventy-nine percent of respondents to the poll expressed a willingness to adopt construction management tooling.

“If printed and stacked, the 3.6 million pages would be 3x the height of the building itself,” Buchner said. “It would take a human 50 years to read — it takes Trunk Tools seconds to structure and give insights.”

Occupying a construction software market that could be worth $7.5 billion by 2032, Trunk Tools competes with vendors like Briq (which uses AI to automate construction financial processes), Join (a “decision-making” platform for construction) and PlanRadar (which digitizes construction and real estate docs).

Trunk Tools appears to be holding its own, however, with a “double digit” number of construction industry customers and thousands of users. Buchner says that the company is targeting a 4x revenue to burn rate ratio.

To help get it there, Trunk Tools this month closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Redpoint. Bringing the company’s total raised to $30 million, the new cash will be put toward growing Trunk Tools’ 30-person, New York-based team as well as developing new services like Trunk’s recently launched construction worker incentive program, Buchner says.

“Construction technology so far has focused mainly on digitizing — taking what we used to do on paper and doing it on computers,” Buchner said. “Slipped timelines and rework can completely crush the razor-thin margins of construction projects, and Trunk Tools can alleviate both.”