Merlin is a Chrome extension and web app that surfaces multiple AI models, including GPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Mistral Large, inside whatever site a user has open, triggered with a Ctrl/Cmd+M shortcut. Siddhartha Saxena, Sirsendu Sarkar, and Pratyush Rai founded the company, operating as Foyer, in 2021, and it has since attracted more than 1 million users and $8.3 million in funding from investors including Better Capital India and HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah.
Merlin adds dedicated buttons to Gmail, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube for drafting replies, generating posts, and summarizing videos with timestamps, and can summarize PDFs and long articles from any tab without copy-pasting text into a separate chatbot. The Pro plan is marketed as 'unlimited fair access,' but runs on a hidden credit system pegged to the real cost of whichever underlying model a request uses, capping out around $100 of model usage a month at full price.
Merlin suits professionals, students, and content creators who want one AI access point across the sites they already use rather than juggling separate subscriptions to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. A free plan allows 102 queries a day with no credit card; the Pro plan runs $29 a month billed monthly, or $19 a month billed annually.
