Meridian

Meridian was founded on a straightforward diagnosis: the credit infrastructure serving small and mid-sized business operators had not materially changed in thirty years. Banks used the same underwriting models. Brokers extracted the same margins. The operators who needed capital most were still the hardest to serve efficiently. Meridian's founders had spent a decade inside the incumbent system and left because they could see exactly where it was broken and precisely how to fix it.

NorthBridge did not need convincing on the fintech infrastructure thesis. We had been building conviction in lending infrastructure for the underserved operator segment for eighteen months. What Meridian brought was a founding team that had built credit products at scale, a technical architecture the incumbents could not replicate quickly, and a customer pipeline that showed early demand without a dollar of marketing spend. We moved on conviction within three weeks of the first meeting.