Meridian Ventures was born out of a shared experience: deferred MBAs. Now, founders Devon Gethers and Karlton Haney have raised a $35 million fund to support pre-seed and seed-stage companies founded by people like them.
Gethers, 29, told TechCrunch that the idea for a company came after he met Haney at his Harvard MBA. deferred entry program in 2020.
Gethers grew up in poverty in Washington State, studied behavioral science and economics at the University of Utah, then moved into private equity before starting his own firm (which he later left). Haney, meanwhile, grew up on a farm in Arkansas, raising chickens, birds and “whatever he threw,” Gethers said of his business partner.
Haney, 28, went on to study industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at the family firm, The Stephens Group. The two met in 2023 with the idea of starting a company that would support people who had also deferred their MBAs.
“Our thesis goes against the rhetoric you hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don’t make good founders,” Gethers said, referring to the belief that an MBA prepares students for corporate culture rather than the flexible, freewheeling world of Silicon Valley.
To prove their thesis, Gethers and Haney went out and cold-called prospective limited partners and knocked on doors until they raised $2.5 million in proof-of-concept funding to back 45 companies.
The two attended 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 tough, but the pair ended up raising an oversubscribed $35 million in capital from LPs, including publicly traded banks, family offices and Fortune 500 executives, Gethers said. They graduated from Harvard Business School in 2025.
This new fund will support founders building business technology in the United States. Meridian is agnostic, Gethers said, noting that the firm has already invested in companies in fintech, logistics, healthcare and, of course, artificial intelligence. The average check size will be $500,000 for pre-seed and $750,000 for seed, and the fund hopes to grow over the next three years.
“We’ve seen a widening gap between ambitious founders building cutting-edge technologies and the capital needed to help drive those ambitions,” said Gethers. With this $35 million fund, we aim to fill that gap.”
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