Merge as B2B Integration Layer

The biggest prize for Merge is not selling one more HR connector, it is becoming the default plumbing that every B2B product team uses when customers ask to connect Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Jira, or Snowflake. Once a SaaS vendor embeds Merge into its product, integrations stop being a one off feature and become a repeatable infrastructure layer, which expands Merge from a few software categories into a broad tax on cross app data movement.

• Merge already expanded from HR and ATS into CRM, ticketing, accounting, and file storage, and built 150 integrations in its first two years. That matters because every new category lets the same customer buy more from one vendor instead of stitching together separate tools for payroll, finance, support, and sales data.
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• The buyer behavior is shifting in Merge's favor. Software vendors increasingly need a dozen or more integrations just to compete, and buyers now expect those connections to work out of the box. That turns integrations from optional roadmap work into table stakes infrastructure, which raises the ceiling on how much budget can flow to the category.
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• The upside is large because adjacent markets are much bigger than unified API alone. Workato reached an estimated $150M ARR in 2023 by selling broader automation across enterprise apps, which shows how integration infrastructure can grow into a much larger software budget once it sits in the middle of many business systems and workflows.
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From here, the path is category by category expansion into systems of record like ERP, BI, and communications, then up the stack into workflow and AI data handling. If Merge keeps winning the product integration layer before customers reach for heavier automation tools, it can become core infrastructure for how B2B software exchanges data.