The battle to tame spreadsheets with AI isn’t over but. A brand new firm known as Meridian has emerged from stealth with a extra complete IDE-based method to agentic monetary modeling — and loads of funding to construct it. On Wednesday, the corporate introduced $17 million in seed funding at a $100 million post-money valuation.
“Our aim is to make monetary modeling and spreadsheets far more predictable and auditable,” CEO and co-founder John Ling instructed TechCrunch. “How will you take a course of that historically may need taken cool hours and condense it down into like 10 minutes?”
The spherical was led by Andressen Horowitz and the Basic Partnership, with participation from QED Traders, FPV Ventures, and Litquidity Ventures. The corporate says it’s presently working with groups at Decagon and OffDeal, and signed $5 million of contracts in December alone.
Excel brokers have been a popular target for AI startups, due partially to the excessive value of human-led monetary evaluation. However the place earlier Excel brokers like Shortcut AI constructed brokers into Excel, Meridian operates as a stand-alone workspace, extra akin to Cursor. This permits the app to function like an IDE, integrating information sources and different exterior references which may in any other case create friction.
Based mostly in New York, the Meridian workforce consists of each alumni of AI corporations like Scale AI and Anthropic in addition to monetary veterans from corporations like Goldman Sachs.
As Ling describes it, Meridian’s greatest problem is the strict necessities of economic purchasers, which frequently conflict with the non-deterministic nature of AI fashions.
“For those who go to 10 completely different software program engineers at Google, and also you need to add some new characteristic into an app, you’ll most likely get like 10 utterly completely different implementations. And that’s completely tremendous,” Ling says. “However in case you go to 10 banking analysts at Goldman Sachs and also you ask for 10 valuation fashions for an organization, you’d most likely get 10 nearly equivalent workbooks.”
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June 23, 2026
Because of this, the Meridian workforce has accomplished important work to make their outputs extra auditable and deterministic, whereas sustaining the pliability of LLM-based instruments. The result’s a combination of agentic AI and extra typical tooling, minimizing the hallucinations that decelerate many enterprise deployments.
“Our aim is to actually take away the doubt layer proper from the LLM course of,” Li says. “ precisely how the logic flows, and all of those assumptions or no matter that go into the mannequin, you may see precisely the place they’re coming from.”
