Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet

The push to bring artificial intelligence into the world of spreadsheets is far from finished. A newly launched startup, Meridian, has stepped out of stealth mode with an ambitious plan to overhaul agent-driven financial modelling through a more robust IDE-style environment — and has raised significant capital to execute that vision. On Wednesday, the company revealed it closed $17 million in seed funding at a $100 million post-money valuation.

John Ling, Meridian’s co-founder and CEO, said the company is focused on transforming how financial modelling is built and reviewed. “Our goal is to make financial modelling and spreadsheets way more predictable and auditable,” Ling explained. He added that Meridian aims to compress workflows that traditionally take hours dramatically. “How can you take a process that traditionally might have taken several hours and condense it down into like 10 minutes?”

The seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership, with additional backing from QED Investors, FPV Ventures, and Litquidity Ventures. Meridian says it is already collaborating with teams at Decagon and OffDeal, and reported signing $5 million in contracts in December alone.

AI-powered Excel agents have become a major focus for startups, largely due to the high cost of manual financial analysis. However, Meridian’s approach differs from earlier entrants. While companies such as Shortcut AI have embedded AI agents directly into Excel, Meridian has opted to create a standalone workspace. The experience is described as being closer to Cursor, allowing the platform to function more like an integrated development environment. By operating independently, Meridian can integrate multiple data sources and external references, reducing friction and increasing flexibility.

Headquartered in New York, Meridian’s team blends technical and financial expertise. The company includes former employees from AI-focused firms such as Scale AI and Anthropic, as well as professionals with backgrounds at financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs.

Ling noted that one of Meridian’s biggest hurdles lies in meeting the strict standards of financial professionals. Financial modelling demands consistency and reliability, which can conflict with the probabilistic nature of large language models.

“If you go to 10 different software engineers at Google, and you want to add some new feature into an app, you’ll probably get like 10 completely different implementations. And that’s totally fine,” Ling said. “But if you go to 10 banking analysts at Goldman Sachs and you ask for 10 valuation models for a company, you would probably get 10 almost identical workbooks.”

Because of this expectation for uniformity, Meridian has invested significant effort into making its outputs more deterministic and transparent. The company combines agent-based AI systems with more traditional tooling to increase auditability and reduce the hallucinations that often complicate enterprise AI deployments.

“Our goal is to really remove the doubt layer right from the LLM process,” Ling explained. “You know exactly how the logic flows, and all of these assumptions or whatever that go into the model, you can see exactly where they’re coming from.”

With fresh funding, early enterprise traction, and a clear focus on reliability in financial workflows, Meridian is positioning itself to reshape how AI interacts with spreadsheets—not simply as a plug-in feature, but as a fully integrated modelling environment designed for precision and accountability.