Meridian: The Future of Private Equity CRM

The CRM in private equity is a massively underutilized asset. Think about it - it’s a unique piece of software that sits right at the center of your deal flow. 

Used correctly, a private equity CRM should understand the companies you spend time with, recognize which advisors send you the best deals, and ultimately help you source better investments. A private equity CRM should allow you to focus more time on the deals that matter the most.

At Meridian, we speak to hundreds of PE firms a month. We hear a few messages repeatedly: 

We hate our CRM. Nobody uses it. Manually logging interactions and deal metrics is a pain and takes forever. 

Our old, clunky DealCloud implementation is jammed with out of date, inaccurate information. I don’t trust what’s in there.

I run my own pipeline out of excel because our Salesforce sucks so much. I’m pretty sure people only log in a few times a month. What a waste of money!

We’d seen the pain firsthand. We’d wasted so much money on “custom implementing” tools like DealCloud and Salesforce only to receive software from 1995. We know from experience that the second a CRM becomes incomplete, it stops being useful.

Stop getting gaslit by your current CRM provider

Over the last year, we’ve spoken to nearly a thousand PE firms that feel the same way. People are sick of being gaslit by traditional CRMs made for sales teams and made to feel needy for expecting better from their core deal team software.

Well, we don’t think you should be made to feel bad for having high expectations. In fact, we spent more than a year crafting a CRM made for Private Equity. Building a private equity CRM that just works is much harder than replicating the base functionality of something like a DealCloud with a pretty UI. 

Meridian is the best private equity CRM out there

Meridian was founded and funded by investors from top firms like:

• Blackstone
• Thoma Bravo
• HIG Capital
• CVC

Meridian is the first private equity CRM that just works.

We set the bar for ourselves insanely high:

Our backend data infrastructure didn’t just have to scale up perfectly with millions of records. It had to fit like a glove with our beautiful front end. 

Our AI agent, Scout, wasn’t just a GPT wrapper we slapped on our app. It’s vertically integrated into Meridian at every level. It’s a true agent that’s capable of understanding your deal flow and the metrics that drive your decision-making.

Our front end had to be so intuitive that using Meridian felt just like pulling your iPhone out of your pocket. 

The beauty of Meridian is in its simplicity. Funnily enough, its simplicity is also why it was so hard to build. But we knew it was worth it, and the results speak for themselves.

1. Our backend data infrastructure didn’t just have to scale up perfectly with millions of records. It had to fit like a glove with our beautiful front end.
2. Our AI agent, Scout, wasn’t just a GPT wrapper we slapped on our app. It’s vertically integrated into Meridian at every level. It’s a true agent that’s capable of understanding your deal flow and the metrics that drive your decision-making.
3. Our front end had to be so intuitive that using Meridian felt just like pulling your iPhone out of your pocket.
4. The beauty of Meridian is in its simplicity. Funnily enough, its simplicity is also why it was so hard to build. But we knew it was worth it, and the results speak for themselves.

You can ask Scout to summarize a document or tell you the risks associated with a potential deal. It also continually cross-references and validates all data points in your CRM to ensure everything is captured, verified, and enriched. 

Finally, it checks both your private records and information from public databases to ensure complete accuracy. With this information, you can make faster and more informed decisions.

Meridian has what you’re looking for in a CRM because we built it for private equity firms just like yours

Our CEO and many other team members have worked at big private equity firms. We all had the same wishlist:

• One-click Outlook sync that works like magic
• Instant company look up of 26 million companies
• 100% data enrichment included in our price
• Tools to enhance your focus on the prospects and relationships that matter the most
• Intuitive report building
• Unlimited seats in your contract so no more seat rationing 

And so we built those exact features.

We really care about reducing friction. You don’t even have to log in to Meridian; you can forward an email to the CRM saying, "log meeting notes for this company" or “save this CIM”.

Instantly, our AI extracts key insights, updates relevant records in the CRM, and ensures critical information is saved centrally so all team members can access it. You don’t have to select what company or contact to save the information to, our AI figures that out itself.

Everyone wants AI, right?

I see all these legacy PE CRMs slapping chatbots on top of their sh***y slow databases and calling it a day. 

At Meridian, AI is vertically integrated at every level of our application architecture. Ninety percent of the time, you won’t know it’s there, but stuff just starts to work. 

Your emails sync perfectly. Your company records are complete with all the information available on a company. You just got sent a CIM, and suddenly, the private financials are logged for future reference. You’re reminded to follow up with that CEO you met last year and were considering raising next month. 

Don’t settle for a chatbot. If you’re buying software in 2024, you deserve better.

“We love what you’ve built, but isn’t it painful to switch?”

I haven’t spoken to a single private equity, credit, or growth firm that is happy with its CRM. 

The main initial objection we face when selling is, “We’ve got our data in Salesforce; isn’t it a pain for us to switch?”  

We love hearing this because we’ve made data migration one of our top strengths. Honestly, post-AI, the migration is the easy part. Sure, we can map your CSV export rows and columns. 

But Meridian’s white-glove data service goes so much further. As part of your implementation, we do a full data transformation. We take your messy, incomplete and outdated CRM data. We cleanse it. We enrich it. And we extract structured data from the wealth of old forgotten deal folders. 

When you onboard with Meridian, we ensure that you start day 1 with the absolute best database on your relationships and the companies you want to invest in. 

At a certain point, you’re going to need to switch. Because trust us, you’ve already fallen behind.

But we use our data efficiently

Private equity is an increasingly data-driven industry. The biggest firms, like Blackstone and KKR have huge data science teams. There’s more data out there than ever before, and if you’re not harnessing it, you’ve fallen behind. 

Using Meridian, you can keep up with the industry's biggest players. 

Try the best Private Equity CRM available

Our North Star when creating Meridian was: 

• Keep your database 100% up to date with 10x less effort.
• Empower firms to source more high quality deals

And we’ve done exactly that. 

Book a demo and modernize your investment process with Meridian.