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The official CEO.com podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with the leaders shaping our world.
Clint Betts: Shensi, thank you so much for coming on the show. What an honor to have you. You’re the co-founder and CEO of Merge, which is a technology company that provides a unified API to help B2B software products connect across multiple systems, including HRIS, ATS, accounting, file storage, ticketing, and more.
Welcome to the show. Give us a sense for how you became the co-founder and CEO of Merge.
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
I became the co-founder and CEO of Merge about five years ago when I started the company with one of my best friends from college.
At the time, we were both living in San Francisco and working at startups that kept running into the same problem: needing tons of integrations.
We were both really interested in the space and felt there was an opportunity there.
Fast forward to today, we have around 120 employees across San Francisco, New York City, and Berlin. We serve more than 400 enterprise customers and around 20,000 self-serve organizations using our products.
And we actually just launched our second product last week.
Clint Betts: Tell us about the second product. That’s a big deal.
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Yeah, I’m really excited about it.
I’ve read a lot about companies doing their “second act,” and this feels like ours.
The new product is called Merge Agent Handler.
Essentially, we help AI agents securely connect to third-party tools.
Before AI, workflows were much more deterministic. You’d press a button, sync data in a consistent timeframe, and everything followed fairly predictable patterns.
But agents operate very differently. They make decisions dynamically.
Someone might ask an agent to retrieve the latest support tickets, create a new Salesforce opportunity, or perform all sorts of actions on the fly.
The actions become almost unlimited.
With the rise of MCP as a protocol, APIs are becoming much more dynamic and flexible. So we built Agent Handler to help companies manage credentials, connectors, and security around those integrations.
There are a lot of security concerns around what agents can access and do, especially when sensitive information is involved.
Our product provides another layer that makes all of that significantly easier and more secure to manage.
Clint Betts: So when you say agents, you’re talking about AI agents?
Give me a sense for how you’re thinking about AI more broadly and integrating it into the company.
Because one thing that strikes me about what you’re solving is that a lot of the early AI-agent startups didn’t seem to think deeply enough about compliance and security.
How are you approaching that?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: I think the risk profile for AI agents increases exponentially once they start interacting with third-party systems.
If agents are siloed and not passing data around, the risks are much smaller.
But once they start integrating with all these external systems—where credentials, permissions, and PII are involved—the complexity increases dramatically.
That’s where our product comes in.
We help connect agents to third-party tools securely, and that requires:
monitoring,
credential management,
permission controls,
PII detection,
and governance around how data and access are shared across organizations.
We think this is only going to become more important because agents are going to become a very common way of working.
Clint Betts: And you’ve raised an incredible amount of capital.
Your first raise was around a $4.5 million seed round, and then later you raised a $55 million Series B.
How have you thought about fundraising?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: It evolved over time.
We actually raised a Series A in between those rounds too.
When we first started the company, we knew this was going to be an extremely engineering-intensive product.
Integrations are really hard.
Gil and I could build a lot ourselves, but we realized quickly we’d need a much larger engineering team if we wanted to onboard enterprise customers for real production use cases.
So we built a demo in about a month and a half and then immediately went out to raise our seed round.
I’m really glad we did because it removed a lot of stress around hiring excellent engineers and onboarding customers with confidence in the quality of the product.
Clint Betts: At what point did you realize:
“Okay, we’re onto something. This is really going to work.”
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Honestly, it was when our first customers had a pretty rough experience using the product… and still wanted to use it.
Our product definitely wasn’t perfect in the beginning.
But customers kept trying to make it work with us. They were engaged, giving feedback, and pushing through issues.
That’s actually really validating.
If someone immediately gives up on your product, they probably didn’t need it that badly.
But if they’re motivated to help you improve it because they truly want it to exist, that’s a sign you probably have product-market fit.
Clint Betts: Tell me about your co-founder.
How did you guys come together?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: We went to Columbia together and have known each other since we were 18.
The computer science department was pretty small at the time, so everyone knew each other.
We had classes together, group projects together, and we were both on engineering student council.
So we got to know each other both socially and through working together.
Then when I moved to San Francisco, he was already living there. He helped me find my first apartment, my first car—we just stayed really close.
Over time we kept talking about work and eventually realized we were both running into the same integrations problem at our respective companies.
The company was built on a foundation of trust because we’d known each other for so long.
And honestly, it’s just really fun building a company with one of your best friends.
Clint Betts: What does a typical day look like for you?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Chaos.
I wake up, go to the gym every day—that’s really important for me mentally—and then I head to work.
The first thing I do is respond to emails, Slack messages, and catch up on anything I missed overnight.
I also try to carve out time in the morning for reading and staying current on the industry.
Then the day becomes packed with meetings, usually until six or seven at night.
After that, I shift into more individual contributor work:
deep work,
catching up on projects,
and coding.
I still code at night because it helps me stay deeply connected to what’s happening inside the company and the codebase itself.
Clint Betts: So you actually code for fun?
That’s incredible because you and your co-founder are both deeply technical.
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Technically, I’m actually the non-technical co-founder.
I never worked professionally as a software engineer outside of internships.
After college, I went into banking and then growth equity before moving into finance and operations roles.
But when we started Merge, Gil invested a lot of time helping me become a stronger engineer so I could contribute meaningfully.
That became especially important with our second product because we didn’t have many resources initially.
Gil, one engineer, and I built the entire thing ourselves.
It was a huge amount of work, but it helped me deeply understand the product and contribute meaningfully to the roadmap and technical discussions.
There’s just no substitute for actually doing the work yourself.
Clint Betts: Where do you think AI is going over the next five or ten years?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: I honestly think we’re still just at the beginning.
It feels like AI is everywhere right now because everyone is talking about it constantly, but I think there’s still far more impact coming.
A lot of companies still ban AI internally or are hesitant to fully embrace it.
We’re nowhere near full adoption yet.
And there are still major barriers preventing organizations from fully utilizing AI—integrations being one of the biggest.
That’s why I’m so excited about what we’re building.
A lot of these use cases technically exist already, but companies can’t fully unlock them because integrations and security remain difficult.
Clint Betts: How are you feeling about the broader economic environment right now?
Tariffs, uncertainty, all of that.
How are you thinking about 2026?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: I’m very optimistic.
I generally prefer being optimistic.
I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity right now, especially in tech.
There’s still a lot of budget available for experimentation and innovation.
Companies are eager to figure out:
what AI can do,
how their teams can become more productive,
and what entirely new businesses can be created.
Yes, there are shifts happening around headcount and workflows, but I think net-net this creates better businesses and more opportunities overall.
It’s definitely disruptive and scary in some ways, but I think long term it’ll be overwhelmingly positive.
Clint Betts: Give me a sense for how you’ve thought about company culture as you’ve scaled.
Shensi Ding-Lopez: We think about culture extremely deeply.
My personal belief is that you can’t really change culture after hiring someone.
Culture starts during the hiring process.
So we spend a huge amount of time evaluating:
culture fit,
culture add,
how collaborative someone is,
whether they’re aligned with the mission,
and whether they’ll positively contribute to the team dynamic.
Our team is incredibly kind and collaborative.
Everyone works really hard, but people also genuinely support each other.
And honestly, one misaligned person can really damage that environment.
So we’re extremely intentional.
Sometimes we’ll interview someone who is clearly very talented but who we know would negatively affect the culture—maybe they’re overly selfish, political, or difficult to work with.
In those cases, we won’t hire them.
We’re also very upfront during recruiting:
This is a high-commitment environment.
People work hard here.
We’re in-person.
We want people who are genuinely invested for the long term.
I’m really proud of the culture we’ve built.
And whenever people leave, that’s usually the thing they say they’ll miss the most.
Clint Betts: What do you read?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Honestly, before Merge I used to read a lot more physical books.
This year I really discovered audiobooks, and that’s been a huge unlock for me.
I either listen to very “unproductive” books—murder mysteries, random fiction—or history books.
I’ve actually found history audiobooks surprisingly valuable because you can go very deep into a topic while walking or commuting.
Podcasts are great for current events and opinions, but books allow for much deeper exploration.
That said, I do think physical books create a very different mental experience.
Reading physically feels like a more complete mental reset.
Clint Betts: Have you tried the Libby app?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Yes! It’s the best app ever.
It connects to public libraries and gives you free audiobooks.
A lot of them are newer releases too.
There can be waitlists for popular books, but who cares? It’s free.
That app has completely changed how much I read.
Clint Betts: Finally, we end every interview the same way.
At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes.
When you hear that, who gave you a chance that helped get you where you are today?
Shensi Ding-Lopez: I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of people give me opportunities throughout my life.
But one especially formative experience was when I got an offer from Silver Lake’s growth equity fund.
They were only hiring two associates for that class.
I was incredibly lucky to get the opportunity.
That role brought me to San Francisco, introduced me to the tech ecosystem, exposed me to founders, and ultimately pushed me toward wanting to work in operations and eventually start a company myself.
I learned a tremendous amount from Adam Grosser, who founded the fund and had been an early employee at Apple.
That experience completely changed the trajectory of my life.
Without it, I probably would’ve stayed in New York working in private equity somewhere and potentially hating my life.
So that opportunity really changed everything for me.
Clint Betts: That’s amazing.
Shensi, thank you so much for coming on. What an incredible company you’ve built.
And congratulations on the launch of Agent Handler. That feels incredibly important given where AI is going.
Let’s definitely have you back on again sometime.
Shensi Ding-Lopez: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.