Every crime leaves a data trail. Meridian turns seized devices into evidence a court can trust — and follows the trail from the first text message to the final verdict.
Two phones. A procurement tender worth millions. A price agreed in a handful of messages nobody was ever meant to read.
The tender is awarded. On paper, a clean procurement. Underneath, a kickback already moving through a relative's account.
A whistle-blower. A warrant. The suspects' phones are seized and forensically imaged. Two drives land on the analyst's bench — millions of artefacts, and a chain of custody that must hold.
Scroll through the pipeline. The analyst never leaves one workspace.
Offer → award → payment, in eleven days. The sequence is the story.
The Meridian report goes before the court — reproducible, hash-verified, cross-examination-proof. The sequence speaks for itself. The gavel comes down.
Evidence became an exhibit. The exhibit became a conviction. That is the whole point of Meridian.
MERIDIAN turns months of investigation into a court-ready case file — without sending a single document to the cloud.
Every investigator has heard it: show me the evidence. Proof beyond reasonable doubt is what a court demands.
But evidence on its own rarely carries a case. Whoever you hand it to — a prosecutor weighing whether to run with it, a magistrate, an arbitrator, a disciplinary panel — forms their first, strongest impression early. First impressions are hard to undo. A case that lands clearly and convincingly from the outset builds momentum; one that opens in confusion spends the rest of its life fighting uphill.
So the real task of a white-collar investigation isn't only gathering the evidence. It's making the scheme land — clearly and persuasively — from the very first read. Complexity is the fraudster's best defence: the layers, the shells, the cross-border hops exist to make a scheme too tangled to follow. Your job is to cut through that fog before it costs you the room.
MERIDIAN was built to help you win that first hour — to turn what you've uncovered into a case that's clear, credible, and easy to follow from the moment someone opens it.
Five steps. One tool. Everything stays on your machine.
Not features. Outputs that matter to prosecutors, regulators, and courts.
The Judge-Ready Report is built to present plain language, portrait entity cards, and a narrative structure — not a technical network diagram — so a magistrate or arbitrator can follow the scheme. Tell us how it reads on your matters.
MERIDIAN's AI is designed to read your full case graph and draft a structured prosecution narrative — scheme overview, key actors, money trail, legislation, red flags, investigative priorities. Runs locally via Ollama on your own machine; no cloud. (Requires a local Ollama install.)
Evidence Gap Analysis is built to flag the weakest links in your prosecution chain before you hand the file over, with a prosecution-readiness rating. A newer feature — we want your view on whether its judgement matches yours.
The OSINT tab integrates company-record, username, and email-registration lookups, with every result reviewed and approved before it appears on the canvas. These integrations are new and depend on third-party services — real-world testing is what hands-on testing is for.
Drop in a CSV bank-statement export and MERIDIAN is built to parse the transactions, identify counterparties, and build the cash-flow network — turning days of manual transcription into minutes. Bank-format coverage is still expanding; bring your own and tell us what parses.
AES-256-GCM encryption on save files. No cloud. No telemetry. OSINT queries are investigator-initiated and logged; AI inference runs locally via Ollama. The architecture is built so your evidence stays under legal professional privilege — and we welcome scrutiny of it.
Built specifically for financial crime investigation in Africa. Not adapted. Built.
Open a forensic disk image (E01/EWF) read-only, verify its integrity against the acquisition hash, and catalogue what's inside — the documents, spreadsheets, and messages a case actually turns on. Full-text search reads inside PDF, Word, and Excel; the source is never written to, and restricted material is screened and sealed rather than opened. Promote the artefacts that matter into your case with provenance and chain of custody intact — an unbroken line from the seized disk to the charge sheet, all on your own machine.
Three integrated intelligence tools accessible directly from the OSINT sidebar tab. All queries are investigator-initiated, explicitly logged in the case audit trail, and route through the Electron main process — never the renderer. Investigation data never leaves your device. Results land in a staging area for your review and approval before anything touches the canvas.
Ingest a seized disk image (E01/EWF) read-only, verify it against the acquisition hash, and catalogue what's inside. Full-text search reads inside PDF, Word, and Excel; documents and media are reviewed as text and metadata only, never auto-rendered, with restricted content screened and sealed. Promote the artefacts that matter into the case with provenance and chain of custody intact. The newest workspace — real cases are where we prove it against real images.
Import on-chain and exchange transactions and model wallets and exchanges as first-class entities on the canvas. Screen addresses against operator-supplied flagged lists (sanctions, mixers, known scams) and cluster wallets with an explainable common-input heuristic. Deterministic and offline — operator-supplied data, not a proprietary cloud dataset, and not attribution. Tell us which chains and exports matter in your work.
Built to import CSV bank-statement exports and auto-detect the format, extract and deduplicate counterparties, and render the cash-flow network on the canvas. Tuned first for major South African banks (ABSA, FNB, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Capitec); other African banks are being added. Bring your own statements and tell us what parses and what doesn't — this is exactly the kind of thing practitioner feedback shapes.
A range of node and relationship types with full metadata (amounts, dates, confidence, reference numbers). PEP/PIP classification per FICA Schedule 3A, 3B, 3C. AES-256-GCM encrypted save files. Undo/redo. PNG and SVG export. Built and ready to test against the demands of a real case.
Designed to read the full case graph and draft a multi-section prosecution brief — scheme overview, key actors, money trail, legislative framework, red flags, investigative priorities — using your entity names, amounts, and jurisdictions. You edit and approve before use. Runs locally via Ollama on your own machine; no cloud. (Requires a local Ollama install.)
OpenCorporates company lookup, Maigret username search, and Holehe email-registration check, accessible from the OSINT sidebar panel. Staged approval workflow: nothing touches the canvas without investigator review, and every query is logged in the case audit trail — designed to be defensible in court or disciplinary proceedings. These integrations are new; real cases are where we confirm they hold up.
Two distinct outputs from the same investigation data: a full technical report for prosecutors and regulators (entity cards, relationship narrative, cash-flow tables, red flags, source register, exhibit register, certification) and a short executive summary for clients and boards — generated from the EXPORT menu. Export formats vary in maturity; practitioner feedback tells us which need polish.
Built to track full chain of custody per exhibit — collection, transfer, storage, court — across exhibit types including original documents, certified copies, digital extracts, photographs, devices, affidavits, and witness statements. Admissibility flags, gap detection, and an exhibit register in court reports. A newer module we want stress-tested on real evidence trails.
A built-in library of financial-crime typologies — structuring, layering, mule and funnel accounts, circular transactions, shell-company activity, TBML, crypto layering, real-estate laundering, PEP misuse, beneficial-ownership concealment, invoice and procurement fraud, SOE corruption, hawala, loan-back schemes, casino ML, NPO misuse, and more — each with red-flag indicators and relevant legislation. Tell us which typologies matter most in your work.
A deterministic, rule-based scanner — explainable, no black-box AI — with checks mapped to FICA, POCA, PRECCA, PFMA, and FATF recommendations: PEP cash flows, SOE leakage, cross-border structuring, round-trip flows, beneficial-ownership concealment. Each flag is built to carry the specific section reference for STR submission. Help us test the rules against real matters.
Node-level concealment flag — one click in the Properties panel. Concealed nodes display as [PROTECTED A], [PROTECTED B] in all report outputs. Deterministic identifier: same node always gets the same letter across every report section. Every concealment change is logged in the case audit trail.
Degree, betweenness (Brandes algorithm), and eigenvector centrality. The node with the highest betweenness score is your broker — the organiser who controls information and money flow. This is the entity investigations typically need to prioritise for asset preservation and arrest sequencing.
Two investigators work separate parts of the same case. Merge their .meridian files: entities with similar names are automatically matched, edges are rewired, conflicts are flagged. New cross-investigation connections — the ones neither investigator knew about — are highlighted immediately.
Pre-built investigation files drawn from public record — so you can learn the tool on real schemes, demonstrate to clients, and use them as teaching material. Loaded in the app for you to explore.
POPIA requires that personal information is processed lawfully and with appropriate security measures. Legal professional privilege requires that your case data is not disclosed to third parties. Every cloud-based investigation tool creates a problem for both.
MERIDIAN was designed from the ground up to run entirely on your device. AI features use Ollama — a locally-deployed language model with no API calls. OSINT queries are investigator-initiated and route through the Electron main process, never the renderer. Investigation data never leaves your machine.
The question isn't whether AI can help forensic investigators. It can, demonstrably. The question is whether you can use it without compromising your evidence and your client's privilege. MERIDIAN resolves that tension — entirely local inference, complete data sovereignty.
Case data makes zero outbound network calls. No analytics, no telemetry, no update checks, no CDN dependencies. The application works fully air-gapped. OSINT queries are explicitly investigator-initiated, logged in the audit trail, and handled by the Electron main process — never the renderer.
Investigation files are encrypted using AES-256-GCM with PBKDF2 key derivation (310,000 iterations, SHA-256). The passphrase never leaves your device. Even if someone steals the file, it is unreadable without your passphrase.
The prosecution narrative generator, evidence gap analysis, and investigative question generator all use a locally-deployed language model. No API keys, no subscription, no data transmission. Your case context never reaches an external server.
Data processed entirely within your device's jurisdiction. Legal professional privilege is not compromised because no information is transmitted. POPIA's data minimisation and purpose limitation requirements are satisfied because no personal information ever leaves the controller's device.
Full legislation text, key sections, and plain-language descriptions — all searchable from within your investigation without leaving the tool. South Africa carries the deepest coverage (14 statutes). More jurisdictions are on the roadmap — tell us which you need next.
MERIDIAN was designed to address a specific gap: South African forensic practitioners — advocates, forensic accountants, boutique investigation firms — lack access to professional-grade investigation tooling at a price that makes commercial sense.
MERIDIAN was built from scratch around the workflows, legislation, and investigation contexts that African practitioners actually encounter — state capture, municipal looting, VBS-style bank fraud, procurement corruption, and cross-border organised crime.
Every feature was built because a real investigator needed it. The prosecution narrative generator exists because investigators were spending weeks writing briefs the NPA struggled to act on. The OSINT tab exists because digital footprint research was being done manually in browser tabs, unlogged, outside the case file.
We'll walk you through MERIDIAN on real published case data — VBS, 1MDB, Steinhoff — in under 20 minutes. Book a walkthrough or a full demo, and we'll show you exactly how a case moves from raw data to court file. We want your honest feedback on what works and what doesn't.
Investigations journalists, NGOs, and civil society organisations investigating corruption or organised crime are encouraged to apply for the NGO programme.