The Token-Maxxing Bill That Shocks Every CFO — & the Fix

**Gil Feig** (0:00)
We power critical functions for a lot of businesses. Their core could be powered and heavily driven by merge. So these sort of things, we cannot break, we cannot go down. Everything's four or five, six nines of uptime. And if you lose that, you can lose all your customers overnight.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:13)
Some of your customers are names like OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, Dropbox, Freshworks and more.

**Shensi Ding** (0:19)
So we do serve some of the largest AI companies in the world, powering their AI search functionality and also connectivity in their products. Consumer expectations are higher now, like you just expect significantly more automation. And so the SaaS platform cannot keep up with the expected automation. It's just hard to compete.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:32)
What is the state of cybersecurity in this layer of AI?

**Gil Feig** (0:36)
They now speak English perfectly, they now write code perfectly, and they now have unlimited manpower all driven by AI. The second you connect it to tools, which is what everyone is trying to do right now, that's where everything goes wrong. It's so hard to block them because they're coming from IPs all around the world and all it takes is one and they could mean the end of your company.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:04)
All right, Shensi, Gil, welcome to Sourcery.

**Shensi Ding** (1:07)
Thanks for having us.

**Gil Feig** (1:08)
Thanks so much.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:09)
This is a Merge special. We have a CTO and a CEO on...

**Gil Feig** (1:13)
We're happy to be here.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:15)
So what's going on?

**Shensi Ding** (1:16)
We don't get canceled.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:17)
I don't think you're gonna get canceled. Although we did have some spicy pre-podcast talk.

**Shensi Ding** (1:22)
Yeah, we won't talk about Stables High School gossip.

**Gil Feig** (1:24)
No.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:27)
So you guys are on a tear. You have a lot of big announcements that keep on rolling out. What's the latest? What's going on?

**Shensi Ding** (1:33)
Yeah, honestly, it's been really exciting for us. Around like a year and a half ago, we made a pretty concerted effort to do like three efforts in order to really move ourselves into the AI space. One of them was using AI really aggressively internally, pivoting our existing product to sell, or not pivoting, but adjusting our current product to sell to AI companies, and then also launching our own AI products.
Those beds have really paid off, especially in the past year and a half. It's been really exciting seeing all the hard work that we put in, finally coming to fruition.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:02)
What are those products today?

**Gil Feig** (2:04)
We have now a suite of three products. We have Merge Unified, which is our original product. It helps companies sync data. Basically, you want to bring that in, power something like Enterprise Search, do RAG.
You take that, you ingest all the data, we normalize it, and it's there for your customers. Helps build a really good search experience. Since then, we've also launched Merge Agent Handler, which is essentially one MCP server you can connect to, to help your customers offer, or to offer hundreds of integrations to your customers inside of agents. And this can be used for internal agents within a company when you're building your own. It can be used for external agents, so if you're building a customer support bot, for example. And then it also can be used to power just internal use cases. Your whole team is using cloud code, your team is using, you know, cloud or ChatGPT or whatever it is, the connectors all just appear in there and work with whatever AI tools you're using. And then lastly, we launched Merge Gateway.
And Merge Gateway is infrastructure that just makes it really easy for you to switch between hundreds of different AI models and route them based on a ton of different policies that has security layer built in. And it has a lot of smart routing policies, cost saving policies and dashboards that make it easy for your whole company to really optimize your AI spend and usage.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:20)
One of the observations that I've had over the last two, three years was you can see when companies don't really make a concerted effort to pivot or rebuild or embrace AI. And you can tell either by what they're posting about online, who they're engaging with, like how their products are developing. But you guys did make that concerted effort. What was that process for you internally, especially with your customers too?

**Shensi Ding** (3:50)
I mean, it was really hard. There was specifically one really, really big deal that we wanted to close, and it was going to take up 90% of our resources.