Meridian Raises $17M for AI-Driven Financial Modeling Tools

Meridian did not raise $17M to make spreadsheets prettier. Meridian raised $17M because finance teams still live inside Excel like it is 1998 and nobody has handed them a compass. So John Ling, Zach Kirshner, and George Fang built one. A New York based company under the legal name Longitude Labs Inc., Meridian just emerged from stealth with a $17M seed round at a $100M post money valuation, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, The General Partnership, QED Investors, FPV Ventures, and Litquidity Ventures, with angels including Alexandr Wang and Annie Hu. That is not casual capital. That is conviction capital aimed directly at the cells where billions move quietly every day.

John Ling, CEO and co-founder, knows the pain personally. After time at Scale AI and earlier ventures like Encarte and Canopy, John Ling saw how financial models still hinge on fragile formulas and late night copy paste rituals. Zach Kirshner, co-founder with roots in investment banking at Evercore, understands how a single broken link can ripple through a deal model. George Fang, co-founder with engineering experience at Scale AI, brings the technical muscle. Three operators who have lived inside high stakes workflows decided that spreadsheets needed structure, not stickers.

Meridian positions itself as an IDE style workspace for agentic financial modeling. Not a plug in. Not a chatbot hovering over Excel. A standalone environment designed to orchestrate spreadsheets, PDFs, and slide decks with traceable logic and deterministic outputs. In finance, close enough is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Meridian’s stated objective is predictability and auditability, giving teams visibility into assumptions and logic flow so that hours long modeling sessions can compress toward minutes without sacrificing control.

The traction signals are not theoretical. Meridian reports $5M of contracts signed in December and early customers including teams at Decagon and OffDeal. The pitch is simple and sharp: take workflows that once consumed entire afternoons and reduce them to a fraction of that time, while making every step inspectable. In an industry where accuracy is oxygen, that combination reads less like automation and more like leverage.

$17M is not just a seed round. It is a bet that the future of finance will not be a prettier spreadsheet, but a smarter one. And if Meridian can turn modeling from manual grind into controlled acceleration, the next generation of dealmakers may spend less time wrestling cells and more time deciding where the capital actually flows.