Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet

Honestly? Spreadsheets with AI agents is a real problem — analysts spend half their time copying data around. But $17M for an IDE is betting the wrong thing is scarce.

The moat here isn't the UI, it's whether their agents can actually handle complex financial modeling without hallucinating their way through a balance sheet. That's hard. Palantir's customers would probably switch for something simpler, but that's a crowded market now.

Here's the thing: every YC batch has three companies building this. Meridian's probably just the one that raised first. The question is whether they can stay ahead when spreadsheet vendors start bundling agents as a checkbox feature.

If they're smart, they're going after the Palantir-to-Excel migration story, not competing with Excel itself.