MeridianMade, led by ByHeart CEO Ron Belldegrun, raises $20.3M

Why it matters

MeridianMade gives Ron Belldegrun and Mia Funt a new $20.3M vehicle while ByHeart works to return from its recall. The team overlap points to a serious operating effort, but the product and investors remain undisclosed.

ByHeart co-founders Ron Belldegrun and Mia Funt have taken senior roles at MeridianMade, a new health-care company that sold $20.34 million of equity to 36 investors, according to a Form D filed with the SEC on July 24.

Belldegrun signed the filing as MeridianMade's chief executive. Funt is listed as an executive officer and director. The offering's first sale occurred on July 10, two weeks before the filing appeared, and the amount sold exactly matches the amount offered. MeridianMade was incorporated in Delaware this year and operates from 131 Varick Street in New York.

The filing establishes the financing and leadership roster. It offers no product description beyond "Other Health Care," and it does not identify MeridianMade's founders, participating investors, valuation, revenue or relationship to ByHeart. The matched offering totals show that MeridianMade sold the planned $20.34 million. They do not establish that the financing was oversubscribed or preemptive.

ByHeart-linked operators move inside MeridianMade

MeridianMade's personnel make the filing more consequential than a founder taking an outside board seat. Four additional ByHeart-linked operating leaders appear as MeridianMade executive officers: Georg Krause-Vilmar, Devon Kuehn, Niall Mullane and Neil Betteridge.

That group gives MeridianMade a broader operating roster from day one. Their inclusion points to an operating vehicle staffed from ByHeart's circle, though the filing does not say whether MeridianMade is a subsidiary, sister company, spinout or independent venture.

The board carries similar continuity. MeridianMade lists Arie Belldegrun, Joshua Kazam, Amy Schulman, Denice Torres, Guy Oranim, Raphael Wallander and Hemi Zucker as directors. Schulman is ByHeart's chair and a managing partner at Polaris Partners, according to ByHeart and the Form D context. The MeridianMade filing does not say Polaris invested in the new offering.

Arie Belldegrun adds a different layer of company-building experience. He founded Kite Pharma and led the cancer therapy developer until Gilead agreed to acquire it for $11.9 billion in 2017. Vida Ventures, where he is founder and senior managing director, also lists him as a ByHeart director. None of those affiliations confirms that Vida, Kite-linked investors or another Belldegrun vehicle participated in MeridianMade's round.

A second act after a capital-intensive first company

Ron Belldegrun and Funt started ByHeart as siblings in 2016, pursuing a version of infant formula built around newer breast-milk research and direct control of production. ByHeart's account of its development describes a five-year path through formulation, clinical work, manufacturing and FDA registration before its first formula reached the market.

For Belldegrun, MeridianMade returns him to a familiar intersection of investing and company formation. Before ByHeart, he founded Consumer Health Ventures and spent eight years at Visium Asset Management overseeing pharmaceutical and consumer-health investments, according to his biography at the International Milk Genomics Consortium. His experience helps explain how an undisclosed 2026 company could assemble 36 investors before publicly describing what it sells.

ByHeart also gave the siblings a track record in financing expensive, regulated infrastructure. The business said in May 2024 that it had raised $395 million in total financing, including a $95 million financing announced that month. ByHeart used that capital to develop products, conduct clinical work and assemble a domestic manufacturing network.

MeridianMade's first disclosed round is much smaller, and the filing gives no indication that it will follow the same manufacturing-heavy model. The overlap in medical, quality and operations leadership gives the new entity capabilities suited to a regulated product rather than a holding company or passive investment vehicle. Its exact market remains undisclosed. Infant nutrition, consumer health and biotechnology are all plausible readings of the roster, but none is established by the filing.

The financing follows ByHeart's recall

MeridianMade's emergence comes as Belldegrun and Funt manage the aftermath of ByHeart's November 2025 recall of all batches of ByHeart Whole Nutrition Infant Formula amid an FDA-posted infant botulism investigation. FDA records for the investigation noted 31 suspected or confirmed cases with confirmed exposure and no deaths.

ByHeart has since published safety and testing materials describing new protocols. The company says it is working toward resuming production, though the MeridianMade filing offers no causal link between the recall and the new entity. It also does not indicate that ByHeart assets, products or liabilities are moving into MeridianMade.

For outsiders, MeridianMade is a team-first financing. Belldegrun and Funt have assembled capital around a leadership group that already knows how to develop clinical evidence, manage food-safety systems and build regulated manufacturing. The unanswered question is the product: what MeridianMade intends to make, whether it sits beside ByHeart or beyond infant nutrition, and why that work needs a separate corporate structure.