There’s been a lot of noise in fintech this week, but [Meridian’s debut](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/meridian-ai-raises-17-million-to-remake-the-agentic-spreadsheet/) caught my eye for a specific reason — they’re not just slapping an AI chatbot onto Excel and calling it a day.

Meridian is building a standalone financial modeling IDE, basically treating spreadsheets the way Cursor treats code. Instead of bolting an agent onto your existing Excel workflow (which, let’s be honest, tends to break things more than it fixes), they’ve built an entirely separate workspace where you can pull in data sources, external references, and model logic all in one place. CEO John Ling describes the goal as making financial modeling “way more predictable and auditable,” which is exactly what anyone who’s worked in finance actually cares about.

The team is stacked — alumni from Scale AI, Anthropic, and Goldman Sachs, based out of New York. They just raised $17 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership, with QED Investors and FPV Ventures also in the mix. At a $100 million post-money valuation for a seed round. For a spreadsheet company. That tells you something about how seriously investors are taking the “agentic spreadsheet” thesis right now.

What makes [Meridian](https://www.meridian.ai) interesting to me is how they’re handling the hallucination problem. Financial models need to be deterministic — you can’t have an LLM guessing numbers during a regulatory audit. So they’ve built this hybrid approach that blends agentic AI with more traditional tooling, giving full visibility into every assumption and logic flow. It’s not flashy, but it’s the kind of boring-but-critical engineering that actually matters in finance.

The early traction is real, too. They signed [$5 million in contracts back in December](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/11/agentic-financial-modeling-startup-meridian-gets-17m-funding/) while still in stealth, working with teams at Decagon and OffDeal. That’s unusually strong commercial pull for a pre-launch startup.

The “Cursor for Finance” framing has clearly resonated — both [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/meridian-ai-raises-17-million-to-remake-the-agentic-spreadsheet/) and [SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/11/agentic-financial-modeling-startup-meridian-gets-17m-funding/) covered the launch, and fintech Twitter has been buzzing about it since. Whether Meridian can actually pull off replacing decades of Excel muscle memory remains to be seen, but this is one of the more thoughtful takes on AI-meets-finance I’ve come across in a while. Worth keeping on your radar.