OffDeal is the ultimate exit strategy for small businesses. Their AI-powered platform simplifies the process of finding the right buyer and negotiating favorable terms. Small businesses are the unsung heroes of the American economy, employing nearly half of America’s workforce and making up 44% of the country’s GDP. But when it’s time for small business owners to sell their companies, their options are limited.

Some go to small business brokers or pass the business on to their children, while others just close up shop altogether. Large corporations traditionally use investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, to get acquired for the best price, but Wall Street giants don’t waste their time on acquisitions less than $25 million.

Founded by a former investment banker, Ori Eldarov, and a former Meta engineer, Alston Lin, OffDeal is trying to bridge the gap by automating the work of investment banks to offer traditional M&A services to millions of small businesses.

The startup, part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, created AI agents to discover good businesses to acquire, match them with institutional buyers, and create pitch decks to sell them. But customers never see the software. They only interact with human advisers, who work more efficiently thanks to OffDeal’s software product. That’s the pitch anyway.

“The most important transactions in our lives, they all involve a human,” said Eldarov. “The big mistake that people before us have made is that they delegate everything to Python code.”

OffDeal can help a small business find a buyer, or a buyer to find small businesses. In a demo, Eldarov showed how its AI agents can help with both.

To help a small business find a buyer, Eldarov input the company’s website, revenue, and number of employees into a digital form. Then OffDeal’s agent scraped the company’s website for info about its products, services, and end markets, ultimately producing 150 eligible buyers. The agent also produces information about those buyers’ previous acquisitions and other factors that make it a good match, and offers a way to quickly contact them.

As for buyers looking to use OffDeal to find acquisitions, the startup created a database of 2 million American small businesses that could be looking for an exit in the coming years. It uses similar AI agents to match buyers with small businesses here.

So far, OffDeal says it’s currently under contract with nine institutional buyers looking to use its services, with over 250 others on a waitlist.

OffDeal’s software looks good enough to be a platform itself, but Eldarov insists it’s not. The CEO said he considered building software for small business brokers but figured that adoption would be too slow. Instead, he decided to build his own advisory firm using the product — then compete with them.

But what if OffDeal’s AI agents hallucinate and mess up a major part of the deal? OffDeal’s CTO, Lin, admits it’s not exactly a solved problem in the AI industry but has gotten much better with improvements to underlying models (OffDeal uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 models). That’s why OffDeal and many AI companies have taken the approach of having AI work as a copilot instead of working independently.

OffDeal charges between 5% and 10% of the transaction value for its services, a similar rate to what traditional investment banks charge. Eldarov is betting his AI-powered advisers will be able to close more deals than other small business brokers.

Using AI to automate the grunt work of low-level employees is not necessarily a new idea (see Harvey AI for the legal world or Sedric for compliance) but these startups continue to raise funds across various industries.

OffDeal tells said it recently raised a $4.7 million seed round, led by AI-focused venture firm Radical Ventures. The startup — which charges between 5% and 10% of the transaction value for its services — plans to use this funding to hire more advisers and invest in marketing.

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.