Meridian's $17M IDE Gamble: Building Excel's AI-Powered Gravedigger
Everyone thinks spreadsheets are immortal. Excel has survived the cloud revolution, the mobile revolution, and countless "Excel killers" that now collect digital dust.
But Alexander Sen isn't just another founder with a better grid interface. This former Thoma Bravo VP walked away from private equity's golden handcuffs to solve a problem that's been eating at him for years: "Private equity still runs on fragmented, manual systems."
The $200 Billion Pain Point
Sen's Meridian.AI just emerged from stealth with $17 million and a radical thesis: the future of financial modeling isn't a better spreadsheet—it's an IDE-based agentic system where AI agents do the thinking.
This isn't some Silicon Valley founder guessing at Wall Street's problems. Sen spent years at Blackstone and CVC watching brilliant analysts waste hours on Excel trackers when they should be making deals. His team of 25 engineers and capital markets pros across 7 countries now serves firms managing over $200 billion in assets.
<> "We're building software that finally reflects how top investment teams source and diligence deals—and we've vertically integrated AI to enable workflows that were never possible before."/>
That's not marketing speak. That's a war declaration.
Beyond the Spreadsheet Prison
Meridian's approach flips the script entirely. Instead of cells and formulas, you get Scout—their AI engine that autonomously handles market mapping, deal identification, and evaluation workflows. Think GitHub Copilot, but for financial models that actually understand private equity logic.
They're not just building tools; they're building an AI operating system for private markets. Their Frame document builder launched in November 2025, letting firms generate reports by merging live data with templates. No more copying and pasting between seventeen different spreadsheets.
The technical architecture is fascinating: hybrid SaaS model with per-seat pricing plus API/MCP access for pay-per-call usage. Developers can embed these agentic tools into enterprise apps, essentially democratizing the kind of financial intelligence that previously required armies of analysts.
The Elephant in the Room
Here's what nobody's talking about: this could completely reshape how financial services hire talent.
If Meridian delivers on their promise of 10x ROI through better deal sourcing, we're not just looking at productivity gains. We're looking at fundamental changes in what it means to be a financial analyst. When AI agents can autonomously map markets and evaluate deals, what happens to the junior analysts who currently do this work?
Sen frames this as augmentation, not replacement. But let's be honest—when you can extract decision rationale from fragmented data automatically, you need fewer humans to connect the dots.
The Make-or-Break Moment
Meridian's $7 million seed round from 645 Ventures and Chaac Ventures validated the concept. This $17 million Series A is the real test. Can they scale beyond their design partner firms? Can they handle the compliance nightmare that comes with managing $200+ billion in assets?
The early signs are promising. They've got paying customers, strong retention, and that rarest of Silicon Valley unicorns: actual product-market fit in enterprise software.
But here's my take: Meridian isn't just building better financial software—they're betting that the entire infrastructure of private markets will go AI-native within the next five years.
That's either visionary or delusional. Given Sen's track record and the quality of firms already using their platform daily, I'm betting on visionary.
Excel's 40-year reign might finally be ending. And it's about time.
