Meridian Ventures was born out of a common experience: a deferred MBA. Now, founders Devon Geathers and Carlton Haney have raised $35 million in funding to support pre-seed and seed-stage companies founded by people like them.
Gethers, 29, told TechCrunch that the idea for the company came to him after meeting Haney at Harvard University's MBA deferral program in 2020.
Gethers grew up in poverty in Washington state, studied behavioral science and finance at the University of Utah, then moved into private equity, then started (and later left) his own company. Haney, meanwhile, grew up on a farm in Arkansas and raised chickens, birds and “anything that flies,” Geathers said of his business partner.
Haney, 28, studied industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at the Stevens Group, a family office. The two came together in 2023 with the idea of starting a company that would help people who also deferred their MBAs.
“Our paper goes a little bit against the rhetoric that you often hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don't make good founders,” Geathers said, referring to the belief that MBAs prepare students for corporate culture rather than the flexible, free-wheeling world of Silicon Valley.
To prove their hypothesis, Gethers and Haney called potential limited partners, knocked on doors, and raised $2.5 million in proof-of-concept funds to support 45 companies.
The two enrolled at Harvard Business School in the summer of 2023, and about a year after enrolling, they decided to raise their first institutional funding. Although the funding environment was difficult, the pair ultimately were able to raise $35 million in oversubscribed funding from LPs that included publicly traded banks, family offices, and Fortune 500 executives, Geathers said. They graduated from Harvard Business School in 2025.
This new fund will support founders building enterprise technology in the United States. Geathers noted that Meridian is agnostic and that the company has already invested in companies in fintech, logistics, healthcare, and, of course, AI. The average check size will be $500,000 for pre-seed and $750,000 for seed, and the company hopes to deploy the capital over the next three years.
“We're seeing a growing gap between ambitious founders building frontier technologies and the capital they need to advance their ambitions,” Geathers said. With this $35 million in funding, our goal is to close that gap. ”
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