Meridian, a startup, uses agent-based artificial intelligence to improve complex financial modeling. The company has raised $17 million in seed funding to support its mission. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership, and it values the company at $100 million. Meridian’s official name is Longitude Labs Inc.
The company is working on one of the most difficult and promising uses of AI: automating financial modeling. Today, most financial models are built in Excel spreadsheets. Many early AI tools have tried to work inside Microsoft Excel to help with this process.
But Meridian believes that adding AI into Excel limits what the technology can really do and makes it harder to properly review and audit the results.
Instead of working inside Excel, Meridian has built its own standalone platform. This allows it to offer more advanced features. For example, it can combine different datasets and use outside sources of information more easily than Excel-based tools.
Meridian’s Co-founder and CEO, John Ling, explained that financial institutions operate under strict regulations. Their models must be highly accurate, consistent, and easy to verify. However, large language models, that empower AI systems, do not always produce the same output every time. This unpredictability creates challenges, especially in a highly regulated industry like finance.
“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. But if you go to 10 banking analysts at Goldman Sachs and ask for 10 valuation models for a company, you would probably get 10 almost identical workbooks.”
Ling added.
This highlights why financial models need standard and repeatable results. Meridian is focused on solving this problem. Its platform combines AI agents with traditional financial tools and relies strongly on verified data. This helps reduce the “hallucinations” or mistakes that AI systems sometimes produce.
Because of this approach, Meridian can generate consistent and repeatable results. In simple terms, the same input will produce the same output.
The platform also shows every assumption and each step in the model’s logic. This transparency makes it easier for regulators and auditors to review and verify how the financial model was built.