Meridian Ventures has launched a $35 million fund to support founders deferring their MBAs

Meridian Ventures grew out of a shared experience: the deferred MBA. Now, founders Devon Geathers and Carlton Haney have raised a $35 million fund to support pre-seed and seed stage companies started by people like them.

The idea for the company came about after he met Haney at Harvard’s deferred admission MBA program in 2020, Geathers, 29, told TechCrunch.

Geathers grew up in poverty in Washington state, studied behavioral science and finance at the University of Utah, then moved into private equity before launching his own firm (which he later left). Meanwhile, Haney grew up on a farm in Arkansas, where he raised chickens, birds and “anything that flew,” Geathers said of his business partner.

Haney, 28, went on to study industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at family office The Stephens Group. The two came together in 2023 with the idea of ​​launching a company that would support people who had also deferred their MBA.

“Our thesis goes against some of the mainstream, which is the rhetoric you hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don’t make good founders,” Geathers said, referring to the belief that MBAs prepare students for corporate culture, not the flexible, free-spirited world of Silicon Valley.

To prove their thesis, Geathers and Haney went out, calling potential limited partners and knocking on doors until they raised a $2.5 million proof-of-concept fund to back 45 companies.

The two headed to Harvard Business School in the summer of 2023, and about a year later, they decided to try to raise their first institutional fund. The funding environment was difficult, but the pair ended up raising a $35 million fund that was oversubscribed from limited companies, including 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 US. Meridian is agnostic, Geathers said, noting that the company has already invested in companies in financial technology, logistics, healthcare and, of course, artificial intelligence. The average check size will be $500,000 for seed and $750,000 for seed funding, which DC hopes to spread out over the next three years.

“We’ve seen a growing gap between ambitious founders building groundbreaking technologies and the capital needed to help drive those ambitions forward,” Geathers said. Through this $35 million fund, our goal is to fill this gap.