“Big logos expect a personalized buying journey. Over the last few years Merge has gone on to support the world’s largest enterprises and AI companies, and Coast has played a huge role in how we’ve been able to do that at scale,”
said Shensi Ding, Co-Founder of Merge.
Background
Merge is the leading provider of agentic tools and customer-facing integrations for the largest banks (e.g. JP Morgan, U.S. Bank, Mastercard and Amex), AI companies (e.g. OpenAI and Perplexity), HR technology providers (e.g. BambooHR and Carta), and more.
Before Coast, the Solutions Engineering team relied on docs, testimonials, and live walkthroughs of the Merge dashboard. This led to abstract explanations and longer ramp times for SEs, with high effort required to prep each custom demo.
The Challenge
"In the early days, we were constrained to showing docs and platform walkthroughs. It was hard to paint a cohesive picture of what Merge would look like inside a customer’s product," said Matt Doherty, Lead SE, who has spearheaded multiple demo iterations at Merge.
Custom demos were slow to build and hard to scale. Prospects had trouble visualizing their true end-user experience and it never felt easy enough to show the true power of Merge.
Why Coast
Merge adopted Coast to give SEs and AEs the ability to generate tailored, interactive demos that show Merge working in their customers’ context. With Coast, they can simulate the full user journey: logging in, authenticating integrations, and interacting with data without writing code or stitching together one-off environments. The shift made demos both more effective and dramatically faster to build.
"Enterprise buyers expect a tailored, hands-on demo. Coast lets us tell a clear story, fast. It’s table stakes now."
Impact on the SE Team
- Demo prep time reduced: from hours to minutes
- Ramp time for SEs improved: new hires start using Coast templates in their first month
- Coverage scaled: 4 SEs now support ~14 AEs, often handling multiple demos per day
"Without Coast, we might need one or two more SEs just to keep up with demo prep," Doherty noted. "Instead, we use Coast to scale."
Usage and Workflow
- Nearly every qualified prospect gets a Coast demo—"in the high 90%" according to Doherty
- SEs personalize demos for enterprise buyers, tailoring flows to verticals and data environments
- Sales champions often reuse Coast links internally: in one case, a large financial institution viewed a demo dozens of times across legal, IT, and sales teams before ultimately signing on with Merge
Product Launches and Rapid Prototyping
Merge has also used Coast to quickly stand up demos for new product lines. For example, when launching their "Enterprise Search" feature, the team spun up a completely bespoke demo in one short sprint:
This included:
- A chat interface layered over file storage systems
- Custom flows for AI-powered search
- Rapid iteration across customer feedback loops
Future Plans
Merge is now building Coast templates to support "Agent Handler," a new SKU with two usage patterns: chat-based and workflow-based. Longer term, they plan to unify templates across Agent Handler and their core Unified API to show the full Merge platform in a single interactive experience.
Key Benefits
- 3x+ more demos per SE per week
- Dramatic reduction in demo prep time
- Higher internal demo reuse by champions
- Faster ramp for new hires
- Enablement for new product lines and advanced AI features
Looking Ahead
In 2026, Merge plans to use Coast to further streamline multi-product demos, explore more self-serve experiences, and accelerate upmarket growth with complex enterprise accounts.
