Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet

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 strategy 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 purpose is to make monetary modeling and spreadsheets far more predictable and auditable,” CEO and co-founder John Ling instructed TechCrunch. “How are you going to take a course of that historically might need taken a number of 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 at present 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 partly to the excessive price 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 enables the app to function like an IDE, integrating knowledge sources and different exterior references that may in any other case create friction.

Based mostly in New York, the Meridian workforce consists of each alumni of AI companies like Scale AI and Anthropic in addition to monetary veterans from companies like Goldman Sachs.

As Ling describes it, Meridian’s largest problem is the strict necessities of economic shoppers, which frequently conflict with the non-deterministic nature of AI fashions.

“In the event you go to 10 totally different software program engineers at Google, and also you wish to add some new function into an app, you’ll most likely get like 10 fully totally different implementations. And that’s completely superb,” Ling says. “However for those who 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 virtually similar workbooks.”

Because of this, the Meridian workforce has achieved vital work to make their outputs extra auditable and deterministic, whereas sustaining the flexibleness 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 purpose is to actually take away the doubt layer proper from the LLM course of,” Ling says. “You already know precisely how the logic flows, and all of those assumptions or no matter that go into the mannequin, you possibly can see precisely the place they’re coming from.”