New York-based Meridian has emerged from stealth with $17 million in seed funding and a $100 million post-money valuation, aiming to redefine financial modeling through an AI-native, IDE-style spreadsheet environment.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership, with participation from QED Investors, FPV Ventures, and Liquidity Ventures.
From Excel Add-On To Standalone AI Workspace
While many AI startups have focused on embedding agents directly into spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, Meridian takes a different approach. The company has built a standalone workspace designed more like an integrated development environment (IDE), similar in concept to Cursor.
This structure allows Meridian to integrate external data sources, references, and logic flows in a controlled environment, reducing friction and improving reliability compared to traditional spreadsheet-based tools.
The company reports early traction, including signed contracts totaling $5 million in December alone, and collaborations with teams at Decagon and OffDeal.
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Making Financial Modeling Predictable And Auditable
Meridian was founded by CEO John Ling and a team combining AI expertise from companies such as Scale AI and Anthropic, alongside finance professionals with backgrounds at Goldman Sachs.
The company’s core mission is to make financial modeling faster, more predictable, and fully auditable. According to Ling, traditional financial analysis can take hours to complete and verify. Meridian aims to compress that workflow into minutes, without sacrificing transparency or control.
A key challenge lies in reconciling the deterministic expectations of financial institutions with the probabilistic nature of large language models. In investment banking, valuation models created by different analysts are expected to follow nearly identical structures and assumptions. Meridian addresses this by combining agentic AI capabilities with rule-based logic and structured tooling, reducing hallucinations and improving traceability.
Building Trust In AI-Driven Finance
Rather than relying solely on generative outputs, Meridian focuses on making every assumption and calculation visible and auditable. The platform is designed so users can clearly trace how data flows through a model and understand the origin of each input and logic step.
By blending LLM-based automation with deterministic controls, Meridian positions itself as a new category of AI-native financial infrastructure — one that seeks to modernize spreadsheets without compromising the rigor demanded by enterprise finance teams.
With fresh capital and growing enterprise traction, the company now plans to expand product development and scale adoption among financial institutions seeking faster, more reliable modeling workflows.
