Meridian founder raises $7M seed to build next-gen CRM for private equity firms

couple years ago when he was just getting the company off the ground. So, have him in here. Welcome to the studio, Alex. How are you doing? Hey guys, doing well. How are you doing? What's going on? Not much. It's been a big week for me. We uh we're launching our uh seed round publicly. I had a baby two days ago.

My first launch gone for that. Two. Two. We need two. Wait, how how much did the baby weigh? The baby was 7 lb and it was a 7 million. 7 lb in a $7 million seat. That's the number of the week. Amazing. That's great news. Congratulations. I saw a tweet the other day.

It was like the new fundraiser announcement stack and it was like, you know, tech crunch is out. You guys are in I think what it was the New York Times, right? You would say marriages, deaths, births. So happy to be announc the new thing is baby baby announcements announcements. We definitely have to do that.

We need a different different prop for that. Well, congratulations. Uh it must be a absolute blur of a week, but it's great to have you here. Are you Are you Are you calling in from Miami? Where are you based these days? I'm in Miami. Yeah, I'm at home today. Um company's based between New York and Miami.

We have sales and customer support in New York. I'm down here in Miami today. I'm wearing shorts cuz, you know, I'm here supporting my wife as well. So, throw on a blazer, but there I'm not going to stand up. Uh but anyway, break down the break down the pitch of the company. How are you pitching?

Yeah, and quick and quick backstory too. People need some context and then go into the company. Yeah, for sure. So, I spent about 10 years in private equity. I was at big firms like CBC, Blackstone, and Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. He doesn't get enough credit. Thank you.

And uh I would say one of the common themes of that career was just wrestling with terrible software pretty much across the stack. It was like software that was built in the '90s had kind of been pushed into the cloud and was really never kind of modernized.

And I think a lot of that was cuz private equity as an industry was kind of an SMB for software companies. It was like five or six guys in a room. It was like Henry Kravis and George Roberts, you know, size lords doing a couple of deals and the economics were great. So you never had to make it more efficient.

You never had to figure out how to use software.

Um, and there was this promise of the private equity CRM that was basically it's got all the context of who you're meeting with, the deals that are crossing your desk, all these pitch decks, all this information, but none of it was being harvested into an intelligence layer.

And so firms would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Salesforce and then they'd use it like an Excel spreadsheet, like who's working on what deal, we got to tick through them. Um, and you know, that was about it. There was no like insight that was coming out of it.

And so what we do at Meridian is we combine the concept of CRM with a massive third party company data set and an AI agent called Scout that essentially is the power user of the CRM and the data set. And so what Scout does is it goes out, scour all of the information on private companies that's out there.

And there's really never been more of that.

And really helps you focus your mandate on the ones that you are actually going to invest in and then pulls in all that context that's in your inbox uh that's on your calendar that's in your investment committee memos and helps you focus on the 10 companies in your space in that kind of specific thesis you have that you need to get in front of.

Helps you set up those meetings and helps you kind of get in front of them faster ahead of your competitors. Talk about the structure of the market.

Is this the kind of business that you basically need to get every customer right or at least all the the the truly big logos in order to build, you know, a nine figure revenue business? What what does that look like? Totally.

You know, when I first started the company, people said, you know, obvious right people want a better CRM and private equity, but small market, like how big can it get? And I think what we've discovered is actually just how deep the market is. There are so many private equity firms.

They've never, you know, it's a really fast growing industry, but it's also a broadening industry, right? There's there's private credit that's just going through explosive growth growth. Hedge funds that are doing private deals now and kind of combining private and public. Um, there are family offices.

There are this whole universe of sovereign funds, LPS. And so, we've been lucky to kind of sell to each of those constituents. And I mean, do solo operators or like scout funds like the the HBS grad who's going to go out and buy a a a window washing business? Does that fit?

I mean, we literally have hundreds of HVAC rollups on our suddenly seeing for HVAC HVAC rollups very quickly. That's amazing. Uh h how does value acrruel work in the industry? I imagine that the data brokers and the data providers want their pound of flesh. than the private equity firms.

Uh not notorious for being loose with the pocketbooks. Uh not exactly, you know, they're like they're they're they're going to try and extract as much value as possible. So you're kind of sitting in between those two. Uh how do you not get squeezed?

And what's the fair take rate between these three kind of parties in this in this deal? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, when when I started the company, I kind of had this thesis that we were going to have to charge a huge amount for all of this live data on companies.

But what's happened with AI is that actually that data is so commoditized now. Like you used to pay 7,000 bucks a seat for a pitchbook license.

And what Pitchbook would do is basically structure all this publicly available data around, you know, who invested in which company, how many employees do they have and put it in a database for you. You can get all of that information with good prompting now. And so we actually have our own proprietary data set.

We use AI to kind of scour all of that stuff. We feed it directly into the platform. And so what used to happen was associates would just, you know, copy and paste information from PitchBook, throw it into Salesforce, and, you know, it was just this kind of dumb database that you had to manually update.

Now we're able to just package all of that into the software. And so we do work with a few of the data providers. Source Scrub is one of them because they do have amazing proprietary data, but for the most part, these databases are, in my opinion, going to become incredibly commoditized over time.

What is what is LinkedIn's role in the industry right now? I feel like LinkedIn has an incredible amount of data. I've seen growth equity investors look at headcount growth as a hey, maybe I should give them a call. Yeah, I know.

I know venture investors that track this and they know a company's cooked long before the headlines are coming out all the time. When you see, oh, there's two competitors and one's growing headcount and the other one's not. And yeah, they both raised at 5 billion a couple years ago, but one's actually compounding.

I mean, not that headcount growth is really like it's kind of a vanity metric. could be a bad signal, but it's usually enough that people care doing truly poorly don't tend to 10x headcount in a couple years. Yeah. Uh so, but but I've always been interested in LinkedIn. Back in the day, you used to have an API.

You used to be able to scrape it very liberally. I'm sure it's way more locked down. Is this like just walk me through like even trying to get access? Is it is it available? Is it pricey? Uh what is the dynamic with LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn data is is is a great data source.

Headcount data is probably one of our most requested kind of numbers that we we throw on every company profile. Another one is glass door reviews. People want to know, you know, is this a good place to work. Are the account executives hitting quota? If they're not, you know, that's a bad sign.

Um LinkedIn, you know, they continue to try to lock the data down. Um so that these web scrapers can't hit it. But we do actually work with a couple of really good LinkedIn scrapers. That's, you know, our data sources that we buy it from. They're just, you know, trying to be one step ahead of of the LinkedIn algorithm.

I think not expecting that answer. Totally. I mean, they try to pay wall as much as they can, but there are always ways around it. And frankly, I'm surprised that LinkedIn hasn't just API that data and started to sell it because it really is an incredible database that you can start using.

But I guess they're just not because like they they they will let you pay for a human seat and look at everything, but if you want to automate it, they're they're not as friendly. 100%. Yeah. Interesting. Uh Jordy, any other questions? Uh I'm curious if you have any insight.

We have a friend of the show that was posting this morning. Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask this. This is good. Uh, I'll pull up the post. You probably have crossed paths with him at some point. This is carried no interest. Uh, he's a non. He says, "Uh-oh, it is happening about two weeks ago.

I started getting five plus emails a week saying the same thing. The VCs are ready to start selling. The insane glut that is the 2021 to 2022 vintage might start moving soon. VCs DM me. I have dry powder. " And he says a screenshot. Are you guys still buying software companies?

I have a wellrespected VC firm that is finally wanting to part with a bunch of their good, not great assets or portfolio companies. Are are you seeing this? We hear about this for a long time, but there's always a question of like when will this actually happens?

And I'm sure I'm sure back in your day you you bought I imagine you you acquired ventureback companies that were good but didn't quite, you know, weren't necessarily going to go public or anything along those lines. Totally. I mean, I think the 2021 vintage is is challenged for sure.

And I think we're seeing a lot of, you know, private equity firms just they're going to have to hold those deals for a long time. They're marking them at 1x cuz they have that luxury, but to really grow into value, it could be many years.

And I think that's so even so that's on the but but the but what I was calling out is venture funds are sitting there with a bunch of software businesses that they want to sell to PE.

So the challenged uh you know vintage and ventures trying to sell to you know effectively a 2025 or 2024 vintage on the private equity side. Totally. No. And I think that's going to happen more and more. The IPO windows closed. Private equity is sitting on a lot of dry powder. They got to buy stuff.

And I think those VC funds are going to see you know definitely value impairment, right? Private equity are not paying the type of let's say ARR multiples um that they probably invested in. But there's a lot of great IP that's out there.

I think for the right private equity firm to come in, buy the IP, probably roll together a few of these things, I think it's actually going to be a great strategy and I'm I I definitely see private equity firms getting more creative um with how they want to work with some of these early but uh you know really highly valued companies that got over their skis.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on on the new baby and the seed round. Uh it is big week for you. Yeah, congrats. Come back on again soon. We'll talk. Bye. Up next, we're covering our breaking news with Andre and Horowits. They said they wouldn't do this deal, but they did.

They said it was impossible. The chattering the chattering masses said it wouldn't it wouldn't get done, but it did. And we have Who do we have in here first? I think Brian. Um, apparently Brian and Roy are both in the waiting room. I don't know if we want to let them in at the same time. Have them go back to back.

What are you thinking, Jordy? I think we start with