When Maltese founder Zack Xuereb left the University of Malta with a Maths and Computer Science background, he was already looking beyond exams and traditional career paths. What he really wanted was to build things — real products that real people would use.

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“Studying Maths taught me a lot about logic,” he says, “but exams were structured around memory, which felt useless for the future. At the same time, my friends and I realised we could build things with code. Creating products felt far more exciting than taking a traditional job.”

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That realisation — that software could turn an idea into something meaningful from scratch — pushed him head-first into entrepreneurship.

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Building His First Startup

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Zack’s first venture was Avail, a privacy-preserving digital wallet built on Aleo, a blockchain network designed for zero-knowledge technology. At the time, blockchain transactions were far from private; anyone could see your full balance if you’d ever interacted with them. “That didn’t make sense for a technology meant to modernise financial infrastructure,” he notes.

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Avail taught him one lesson that he now considers fundamental to every successful tech business: “You have to speak to real customers before building anything.”
The blockchain world, he says, often operated in an idealistic bubble — but products only succeed if they solve concrete problems for real people.

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A Global Journey With Aleo: Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore

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After Avail, Zack joined Aleo in the US, just months before the company’s public mainnet launch — the moment the network would begin processing real money. He found himself operating at the intersection of high-stakes engineering and global expansion.

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His role involved integrating Aleo into platforms ahead of launch and travelling across Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, and Bangkok with Aleo’s then-COO (now CEO) to meet banks, developers, and strategic partners.

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Those months abroad tightened his understanding of what it takes to build and scale a global tech company.

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“I learned directly from the COO how to run a company — how to set objectives, measure progress, and build a world-class product,” he says. Exposure to different cultures also reshaped how he thought about software: not as a local tool, but as a global language.

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Spotting the Shift in How the World Searches

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After years in blockchain, Zack saw something bigger brewing: the collapse of traditional search as we know it.

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For 25 years, Google’s blue links connected searchers with businesses, powering a $100 billion SEO industry. But AI, he explains, is completely flipping that model.

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Tools like ChatGPT are quickly becoming a new gateway to information — and every shift in user behaviour creates a corresponding shift in how brands need to be discovered.‎

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That’s where Meridian, his New York-based startup, comes in.

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Meridian runs daily prompts across platforms like ChatGPT to analyse: which brands appear in AI-generated answers, in what context and sentiment, what sources the AI is citing. With that intelligence, the platform helps companies create the type of content AI tends to reference, engage with publishers who influence model outputs, and optimise their own web presence for this new AI-driven discovery layer.

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“In simple terms,” Zack says, “we help companies understand and improve how they appear in AI search.”

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Today, Meridian already supports 100+ companies globally, ranging from e-commerce brands fighting to maintain visibility to agencies managing multiple clients in an increasingly AI-shaped internet.

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‎Raising Millions — and the Hardest Part of Building in New York

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Venture capitalists were drawn to two things: the size of the opportunity and belief in the founders’ ability to execute. “For most investors, those are the core pillars,” Zack explains. “A massive shift in how the world works — and a team capable of building something meaningful in that space.”

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But the biggest challenge hasn’t been fundraising. It’s been people.

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“Finding great people who want to join us on the journey is the hardest part,” he says. “Building a team with the right mix of ambition, skill, and ownership is incredibly difficult.”

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Looking ahead, Zack’s ambition for Meridian is straightforward but sweeping: “to make every company discoverable and transactable in the age of AI.”

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But he also carries a more personal mission — to inspire Maltese students and young people to think globally and ambitiously.

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“I hope my journey shows that you can learn anything quickly if you’re driven by curiosity,” he says. “Technology creates opportunities far beyond our borders. The internet lets you meet anyone, build from anywhere, and compete globally. But the starting point is always understanding what you truly want out of life.”