Meridian

Global Citizens is a San Francisco-based immigration platform that combines decades of legal expertise with cutting-edge AI technology to help individuals, employers, and law firms navigate U.S. immigration processes. Founded by Owen Zhang (CEO, former Google product and engineering leader), Jomana Abdallah (Head of Immigration with 8+ years of immigration law experience), and Demetrius Johnson (CTO with product design and engineering expertise), the company brings together deep domain knowledge and technical innovation. With a distributed team spanning San Francisco, Bengaluru, Sao Paulo, and Guadalajara, Global Citizens serves a diverse clientele including individual immigrants such as scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs, as well as companies hiring international talent and immigration law firms. The team's track record speaks to their capability, with a 99.5% approval rate and over 1,000 approved visas across their collective careers.

Aleph is AI-native and designed to be the always-on decision layer for modern businesses, offering real-time data collaboration for finance teams and automating reporting, variance analysis, and forecasting. It operates as a global digital advertising powerhouse serving 150+ countries, connecting over 26,000 advertisers to a 3 billion consumer audience and partnering with major platforms such as TikTok, X, Microsoft, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify and Google. Its mission is to make the digital world accessible to all, while connecting global brands with local audiences in emerging markets and empowering businesses and individuals through its Digital Ad Expert education platform. The company also facilitates cross-border payments and credit underwriting through Local Payments by Aleph, supported by a team of over 1,500 digital experts in 75+ offices and backing from investors including CVC Partners, Mercado Libre, Sony, X (formerly Twitter), and Snap. Aleph serves a spectrum of clients from small startups to multinational corporations, boasting a trial-to-customer conversion rate exceeding 90%.

Augustus is building the global dollar bank. Moving dollars across borders still runs on correspondent banking, a chain of intermediaries that is slow, opaque, and expensive. Augustus replaces it with programmable USD and EUR accounts, direct clearing and settlement, and an AI-native core banking platform built from scratch. The moat is the license. Augustus holds OCC conditional approval for a US national bank charter, which is rare and very hard to replicate, and euro clearing is live today for customers including Kraken. $180M Series B at a $1B valuation, led by Tiger Global with QED, plus operators from Nubank, Ramp, Circle, Revolut, and Coinbase. Fewer than 50 people, in NYC and Berlin.