Shensi Ding

Shensi Ding is co-founder and CEO of Merge, the unified API company she started with Gil Feig after the two met as computer-science classmates at Columbia. They founded Merge after watching integrations block sales and drown engineering at the San Francisco startups where they worked post-college.

Columbia classmates and the Sweetgreen dinner

In Merge's founding essay Ding recounts meeting Feig freshman year at Columbia, then reuniting in San Francisco: she was chief of staff at Expanse, he was head of engineering at Jumpstart, and both watched integrations consume entire teams. A weekly dinner conversation turned into the company.

Unified API as the integration product

As CEO of Merge she raised a $55M Series B led by Accel and kept the product focused on normalized, secure unified APIs with tooling for customer success to debug integrations. The thesis is simple: growing B2B companies cannot hand-build every customer's vendor stack.