Meridian Ventures Closes $35M Fund Targeting Pre-Seed and Seed Startups

Meridian Ventures announced on Friday the raise of a $35 million second fund. The vehicle will back pre-seed and seed-stage companies founded by those who have deferred MBAs and will focus on founders building enterprise technology in the United States. Devon Gethers, 29, and Karlton Haney, 28, founded the firm after meeting in Harvard’s MBA deferred admission program in 2020.

Gethers grew up in poverty in Washington State, studied behavioral science and finance at the University of Utah, moved into private equity and later launched and exited his own company. Haney grew up on a farm in Arkansas raising chickens, birds, and anything that flew.

He studied industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at the family office The Stephens Group.

The two came together in 2023 with the idea of launching a firm that backed people who had also deferred MBAs. 5 million as a proof-of-concept fund to back 45 companies before heading off to Harvard Business School in summer 2023. Gethers and Haney graduated from Harvard Business School in 2025.

About a year into their studies they decided to raise their first institutional fund despite a tough funding environment. The $35 million fund was oversubscribed and came from LPs including publicly traded banks, family offices, and Fortune 500 executives. Average check size will be $500,000 for pre-seed and $750,000 for seed, with the capital hoped to be deployed over the next three years.

Meridian Ventures has already invested in companies in fintech, logistics, healthcare, and AI. TechCrunch reported that the firm remains agnostic on sector within enterprise technology. “Our thesis is going against a bit of the grain, the rhetoric you hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don’t make good founders,” Gethers said.

He added that an MBA is often viewed as preparation for corporate culture rather than the flexible world of startups. To test their approach, Gethers and Haney cold-called prospective limited partners and knocked on doors until they assembled their initial proof-of-concept vehicle. The experience informed the larger fund now closed.

“We saw an expanding gap between ambitious founders building frontier technologies and the capital required to help carry those ambitions forward,” Gethers said. TechCrunch reported the firm’s origin story traces directly to the shared experience of deferred MBAs that shaped its investment thesis.