Investment diligence for angels and small funds
Drop in a startup’s pitch deck and data room. Meridian reads them and produces a structured investment memo: the business, the market, the numbers, the risks, and the sharp questions to ask the founder.
Two memos a month, free. No card required.
fernpath-seed-deck.pdf
reading
FERNPATH
AI copilot for independent insurance agencies
TRACTION
Launched October 2024. As of June 2025 we are at
$412,000 ARR across 48 agencies, up from $90,000 in
January. Net revenue retention is 104%. Logo churn
is 3.1% monthly. Our largest agency, Brookline
Insurance Group, is 22% of ARR.
BUSINESS MODEL
$690 per seat per month, four seats average. Gross
margin 61% after LLM and integration costs. Blended
CAC $6,400, fourteen month payback.
The problem
A small investor sees ten or twenty decks in a busy month. Reading each one carefully enough to form a view takes most of a weekend. The ones worth a second look are buried in the stack.
Illustrative figures used to describe the problem Meridian is built for, not results from a survey we ran. The ranges reflect what active angels and syndicate leads report about their own deal flow.
How it works
Upload the pitch deck as a PDF or paste the text. Add any data-room documents you have: financials, cap table, customer data. A ten to fifteen slide deck with a handful of exhibits is the typical input. Meridian works out what it is reading without a template to pick.
PDFs where the text is real text, which covers almost every export from Keynote, PowerPoint or Google Slides. Image-only files come back with a message that explains why, rather than a guess.
Uploading files
Add data-room documents or paste text
Every section of the deck is read against the whole document, because a revenue figure means something different next to a burn rate and a churn number. Each evidence quote is verified to appear in your document before you see it. A number the model produced that is not in your deck is dropped, not shown.
Long or self-contradicting documents escalate to a frontier model. If anything was dropped for failing verification, the memo says how many and why.
Building memo
The memo comes back with the business in plain terms, the market and comparables, the numbers that matter, the risks ranked by severity, and the sharp questions to ask the founder. Each risk links to the exact line in the deck that flagged it. Copy the question list and send it.
Most investors read the risk section first, then the numbers, then the summary. The memo is built in that order. Export to PDF or Word on Angel and Fund plans.
Fernpath seed memo
2 high risks
See a memo
Fernpath is a seed-stage insurtech. Click any risk in the Risks tab to see its exact evidence highlighted in the source deck. Nothing here is a mockup: this is the product running on a real sample.
Source deck
11 pagesWhat you get
What the company does, who it sells to, how the business model works, and what the founder claims the edge is. One paragraph, no buzzwords lifted from the deck.
Sample summary
Fernpath sells software that automates the paperwork independent insurance agencies run on: it reads carrier emails and policy PDFs and drafts the quotes, renewals and compliance documents. It charges per seat, about $33,000 a year per agency, and is early but growing fast off a small base.
Where the company sits in the market, who the real competitors are, and whether the TAM claim was built top-down or from the ground up.
ARR, growth, retention, margin, CAC and the round, pulled verbatim from the deck. A number that is missing becomes a founder question.
Ranked high, medium, low, with the exact line from the deck that flagged it and why it matters for this stage and sector.
The questions the memo ends with, each with a one-line reason it changes your view. Ranked so the sharpest one is first.
Pre-seed consumer, seed SaaS, Series A deeptech. The framework applies the right lens: what healthy retention looks like at seed is not what it looks like at Series B.
Each step routes to the best model for it. The structured memo and the risk pass go to a balanced model. Long data rooms or self-contradicting financials escalate to a frontier model. A lab changing its price or policy is a config change here, not a rebuild.
See the routing tableBuilt AI-native
Meridian was not a spreadsheet that later added AI. There is no version of this product without modern language models, because the work is reading. No regular expression finds concentration risk phrased as “our largest agency is 22% of ARR”, and no template notices that a top-down TAM and a high monthly churn rate together make the growth chart harder to trust.
Meridian is model-agnostic by design. Every step asks for a task, not a model, and one file decides which lab answers. A lab changing its price, its policy or its quality is a config change here, not a rebuild. Long or self-contradicting data rooms escalate to a frontier model automatically.
Routing table, generated from the code
Candidates from other labs are declared behind the same interface and switch on when their key is present. The escalation rule and the fallback chain are on the How the AI works page.
Our stance
Meridian is analysis and organization support, not investment advice or a recommendation to invest. Every memo is a draft to inform a human decision. Meridian never says buy or pass, never assigns a score, and never recommends a decision. A memo tells you the shape of the deal, the risks to investigate, and the questions to bring to the founder. The judgement stays yours. For anything with real money on it, a memo is the start of diligence, not the end.
Investors
“I got a deck for a seed SaaS on a Tuesday afternoon. The memo came back in about fifty seconds: ARR of $340,000, but logo churn at 4.2% a month, which annualizes to nearly half the customer base. The founder had not flagged that. I asked about it on the call and we had a much better conversation than I would have had cold.”
“We run a rolling deal pipeline with four partners, and we were losing a weekend a month just building the same memo structure for every deck. Meridian does the first pass and we spend the time arguing about the numbers rather than finding them. The founder questions at the end of every memo are the part I steal for my own calls.”
Illustrative investor stories, written to show what Meridian catches. They are composites, not quotes from named customers.
Pricing
Prices are in US dollars and that is the only price list there is. No setup fee, no minimum term, cancel from the dashboard.
Free
Two memos a month, done properly. Enough to run a real first pass on the deals actually in front of you this month.
Most popular
Angel
or $33/mo billed annually
For the angel who sees real deal flow. Unlimited memos, export to send to a syndicate, and a searchable history of everything you have looked at.
Fund
or $124/mo billed annually
For the micro-fund where more than one person reads the deck. Five seats, shared deal notes, and answers the same day.
Two memos a month, free, with the full risk analysis and founder questions included. No card required.