Merge for Private Equity

Improve margins  across your portfolio

Up to ~20% reduction* in LLM spend through a single line of code

*Based on average savings across customers using Merge Gateway’s intelligent model routing.

Talk to our team

Trusted by teams building the next generation of AI products

Testimonial

“With Merge Agent Handler, we can bring a broader set of data connectors to our users faster and constantly expand what our customers can do with Perplexity Enterprise Pro.”

Frank te Pas

Head of Enterprise Product at Perplexity

Case study

“Before launching our HRIS integrations, a few team members at Merge came on-site to train our customer-facing teams on marketing, selling and supporting the integrations. This took additional work off of my team’s plate and has helped us take the integrations to market more efficiently.”

Alex Giddens

Senior Product Manager

Case study

“Working with Merge’s Unified API and beautiful React component took less than a sprint to integrate, test, and release.”

Daniel Marashlian

Co-founder & CTO

Case study

“Merge’s post-sales team is truly amazing. They’re fast, responsive, and deeply knowledgeable of HRIS integrations and our use case.”

Katie Harmon

Senior Director of Channels

Problem

AI is becoming a top 3 cost,  and it’s almost always unoptimized

Every portfolio company independently rebuilds AI infrastructure from scratch. The inefficiency compounds across the portfolio.

Defaults to the most expensive model

Engineering hardcodes one model across all use cases.

AI spend can't be forecasted

Provider invoices don’t break out spend by product, team, or customer. Can’t set limits until after costs spike.

Every portco rebuilds the same infrastructure

Every portco spends months building the same cost controls from scratch. No shared leverage, no compounding value.

One line of code.
Deploy once.
No excuses.

Your portco swaps one URL. Everything else stays the same, including code, SDKs, prompts, product.

Before

base_url = "https://api.openai.com/v1"

After

base_url = "https://gateway.merge.dev/v1"

Optimization happens automatically

Every request is routed to the lowest-cost model that meets quality requirements.

Savings show up immediately

Reduce LLM spend from the first invoice. No engineering work. No rollout risk.

Standardize across every portco

Same integration. Same playbook. No product changes required.

See the math

Turn AI cost optimization into a value creation lever

This is not a one-time optimization.
It’s a playbook you apply across every company.

Example

How a $1M/year AI spend becomes $800K

A mid-market SaaS company spending $1M/year on LLM inference. Here’s what happens after a 1-minute integration.

Step 1

You find the waste in diligence

Engineering hardcoded every AI call to the same model, paying premium rates for simple tasks that don't need them

*Illustrative: 2.8M requests/month at 1,000 tokens average (input only), priced at GPT-4's published rate of $30/million tokens

Step 2

Portco swaps one line. Merge does the rest.

Each task gets routed to the cheapest model that maintains quality.

Task type	% of calls	Routing change	Cost /M tokens
Simple tasks (tagging, extraction)	50%	GPT-5.5 → GPT-5.4 nano	$0.80/M
Mid-complexity (chat, summaries)	30%	GPT-5.5 → Sonnet 4.7	$0.30/M
Complex reasoning	20%	GPT-5.5 → GPT-5.5 (no change)	$30/M

Step 3

Margin expansion from month one

No new headcount. No engineering project. Pure margin improvement from month one.

$67k

New monthly spend

$200k

Saved per year*

~$2.4M

Enterprise value at 12x

* Based on $1M annual AI spend per portco with ~20% cost reduction from intelligent routing. Actual savings vary by workload.

Portfolio rollout model

The more companies you onboard, the more leverage you gain

Merge charges LLM cost plus a small margin. No platform fees. No per-seat charges. The margin shrinks as you scale.

$1,000 free credit per portfolio company*

	Portcos	Merge margin	Est. annual savings
Portcos	1–3	5.0%	$320k
Growth	4–7	4.7%	$893k
Scale	8-14	4.4%	$1.81M
Portfolio	15-24	4.2%	$3.24M
Enterprise	25+	4.0%	$4.2M+

How we estimated savings:

Assumes $1M annual AI spend per portfolio company with ~20% gross cost reduction from intelligent model routing. Merge margin applied to post-routing LLM cost. Portfolio savings use midpoint of each tier’s range. Actual savings vary by workload. Enterprise shown for 25 companies.

* Offer available to new Merge Gateway customers that are majority-owned, controlled, or actively backed by a private equity firm, as verified by Merge. To earn the credit, customer must incur at least $500 in eligible Gateway usage in each of two consecutive billing months ($1,000+ total qualifying spend).

“We’ve cut our LLM costs significantly since switching to Merge, and the quality has stayed exactly where it needs to be. The bigger thing for us is uptime.”