Edward Frazer and Samuel Brashears are the founders of DryMerge, which recently raised $2.2 million to make automation easier with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
The duo first met in elementary school, started building stuff, and have stayed in touch ever since. To build their company, Frazer dropped out of Yale University while Brashears left his job at Hive AI. They also 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.”
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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.”
Recently, the duo announced that they had raised $2.2M in a seed round. The round saw participation from Y Combinator, Garage Capital, Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, Breakpoint Capital, angels such as Umur Cubukcu (Citus Data), JJ Fliegelman (WayUp), Kulveer Taggar (Zeus), Nate Matherson (Positional), and others.
According to Frazer and Brashears, they will use the funding to deliver the beauty of automation to everyone in the easiest, fastest way possible: plain English chat.
The majority of DryMerge users are not programmers, Frazer stressed. “Most DryMerge users are truly non-technical. They look like school administrators who’ve never touched a line of code, small business owners who sell physical goods and hate being attached to their computers, sales people who need an extra boost to meet quota, ministers who want to communicate with their congregations online, or asset managers who need to keep track of relationships.”
“We are making automation truly accessible to everyone, and our unique insight is that no-code builders with complicated data transformations and bespoke interfaces don’t work for everyone,” Frazer said.
“We’re making the process of ‘automation’ more like a conversation than a complicated head-scratcher. With DryMerge, users are literally going from ‘problem statement’ to ‘solution’ in seconds, and we want to keep delivering that magic to as many people as possible.”
