About Meridex
The cost of building software fell.
Someone should pass that on.
Meridex exists because there is a widening gap between what AI makes possible and what companies are being quoted for it. We build the systems on the cheap side of that gap and charge accordingly.
How we got here
From spatial data
to everything around it.
The company started in spatial data — a GIS masters, a thesis on public participation and stakeholder engagement, and time spent close enough to the industry to see the same failure repeatedly. At the Esri Saudi user conference, customers openly resisted upgrades that made their work harder. Inside operating companies, teams were drowning in driver and route data with no way to turn it into a decision. The data was there. The analyst was not. The tools assumed one.
Solving that with agentic AI worked. What became obvious immediately afterwards is that spatial data was not special. The same gap — valuable data, no one to act on it, tools that assume a specialist — describes HR, recruitment, reception, finance operations, and most of what a mid-sized company does by hand.
So the company is now an AI solutions firm with a deep spatial practice inside it, rather than a GIS company. We build the tool, hand it over, and keep it alive for a flat fee. Small enough to care, close enough to answer the phone in your language.
It is deliberately built across two places. One founder in San Francisco, close to the model providers and to how this work is being done at the frontier; one Saudi founder in Riyadh, in the market, able to sit in the room. Companies in the Kingdom usually have to choose between a local firm without the engineering depth and a foreign firm without the context. The point of this pairing is that they should not have to.
What we believe
Five things we build by.
- You should own what you paid to build.
- Per-seat licences on bespoke software are an artefact of how agencies wanted to be paid, not of how software works. Buy the build; rent nothing.
- The price should reflect the new cost of the work.
- If a system genuinely takes three weeks now instead of six months, the quote should say so. Most of the industry has quietly kept the old number.
- Arabic is not a localisation task.
- Half our market thinks and works in Arabic. Right-to-left, Arabic voice, and Arabic support are structural requirements, decided at the start, not translated in at the end.
- Maintenance is the product.
- AI systems drift faster than ordinary software. A build with nobody keeping it current is a liability with a launch date.
- A visualisation that does not lead to a decision is decoration.
- Inherited from the spatial practice and applied everywhere. The question is never what the data looks like; it is what somebody should now do.
Founders
One in San Francisco. One in Riyadh.
That pairing is the company. Frontier engineering practice on one side, a Saudi founder in the market on the other — and no layer of account managers in between. You will be talking to the people who build the thing.
Jake Oswald
Co-founder · Engineering & product
San Francisco, United States
Based in San Francisco, close to the model providers and to how this work is being done at the frontier — which is the standard every system we ship is built against.
GIS masters, with a thesis on public participation and stakeholder engagement — the research the spatial practice is built on. Time spent inside the Kingdom's spatial industry, at the Esri Saudi user conference and inside operating companies, is where the company's original thesis came from.
Built ProHR end to end: a full-stack HR platform running on Azure with Entra ID single sign-on and Microsoft Graph integration. That build is the reference pattern for how the company ships internal tools for clients.
Al
Co-founder · Kingdom operations
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Saudi co-founder, based in Riyadh. The reason clients in the Kingdom are dealing with a local company rather than a foreign vendor with a regional email address — someone who knows how decisions actually get made here and can sit in the room.
Full profile to follow. Details are being confirmed before they go on a public page — we would rather leave a placeholder than publish something approximate about a person.
Name and full profile pending confirmation.
Small company,
short conversations.
No sales team to route you through. Describe what you need and one of the two of us replies.