It’s not every day you watch a startup walk into a room full of private equity sharks, drop 26 million verified company records on the table, and say, “We built a better operating system, try to keep up.”
Meridian just closed $7M in Seed funding, led by the sharp minds at 645 Ventures. Chaac Ventures returned as an existing backer, and the rest of the cap table reads like a who’s who of private equity, credit, and M&A law, because, in a twist that shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention, the early adopters of this platform didn’t just use it, they bought in.
Let’s talk facts. Meridian was founded in July 2023. Less than two years later, they’re sitting on a platform that’s already crawling through the workflows of some of the largest private equity firms in the world. This isn’t another CRM with a fresh coat of AI paint, it’s an AI-native OS that rethinks how institutional investors originate, evaluate, and close. Think: automated deal signals, predictive sourcing, market mapping across themes, sectors, and geographies, and it even reads your CIMs so you don’t have to pretend you did.
Credit where it’s due: Founder and CEO Alexander Sen didn’t wander into this world by accident. He earned his stripes at Blackstone, Thoma Bravo, and CVC Capital Partners, so yeah, he’s seen the inside of the machine. CTO and Co-Founder Alex Zagoro brings the engineering muscle, with deep stints at Gagosian, Eon, and Gestalt Interactive. One built the financial architecture. The other built the actual architecture. Together? They’re rewriting how capital hunts opportunity.
Headquartered in New York and Miami, Meridian’s got a team of over 25 spread across both cities. But their reach is global. And the tech? It’s more locked down than your favorite hedge fund’s Cayman trust: SOC2 compliant, single sign-on, full encryption. No weak links, no second guesses.
The platform’s heartbeat is Scout, their AI engine. Scout doesn’t just surface deals, it understands patterns. It connects dots across sectors, tracks thesis-aligned signals, auto-logs meetings and emails, extracts structured insights from unstructured noise, and gives you a faster path to conviction. In a market that’s drowning in data and thin on differentiated edge, that’s not a feature. That’s survival.
This raise will pour fuel into product dev, AI advancement, and go-to-market scale. And it’s happening at a moment when institutional investors are waking up to the fact that the old systems weren’t built for this level of speed or complexity. According to 645 Ventures’ Managing Partner Nnamdi Okike, we’re in the middle of a generational shift, and Meridian is one of the few teams building infrastructure that’s not already obsolete by the time it ships.
If you’re in private markets and still living out of Excel and inbox archaeology, you’re not running a process, you’re running from one. Meridian isn’t a tool. It’s the infrastructure for how deals will get done tomorrow.
