Sarah Merion
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Available now · full-time, fractional, advisory

I design and build the products, systems, and AI infrastructure that turn ambitious visions into new revenue.

Currently leading product innovation at Pacific Community Ventures, which acquired my firm Radiant Data in 2025.

Selected work → Get in touch
Sarah Merion

Hi, I'm Sarah.

I lead product innovation at Pacific Community Ventures, which acquired my firm Radiant Data in 2025. Over the past year I've launched three new AI-native products from 0 to 1, stood up the company's AI-native operating infrastructure, and cultivated a sponsorship partnership with a publicly traded bank from a cold introduction I made 18 months ago.

Across 15 years in tech, consulting, and mission-driven companies, I've built operating models, integrated tech stacks, designed go-to-market plays, and turned executive vision into systems teams actually run on. I co-founded Radiant Data in 2023. Before that, I founded a workplace wellness platform that was acquired by SimplaFYI in 2017, and ran Impact Aligned, advising C-suite teams on strategy, product, and operations.

I work at the intersection of strategy and execution. I shape the thesis, design the business model that makes it work, build prototypes to validate it, and architect the operating system that runs it. AI-native, customer-obsessed, and unwilling to design strategy that doesn't translate into something real.

Point of view

Should this be built?

In the age of AI, anything can be built. The constraint isn't possibility anymore. It's discernment.

The answer to "can it" is always yes. The harder, more useful question is whether we're solving a real problem, or just adding to the noise and digital waste of an industry that can ship anything in two days.

I'm a problem-obsessor first. In the age of AI, the easy work is whether the thing functions and looks good. Both will. That's not where the value is.

That's why I swim upstream. I prioritize market dynamics, go-to-market truth, and the customer pain worth solving. And I prioritize stakeholder alignment: lining the right people up, engaging them, getting them ready so the moment we ship, demand and momentum are already there. "Build it and they will come" isn't a hope. It's something you engineer in advance.

Get the problem right, and the solution is the easy part. That's my edge: the upstream thinking that makes anything I build downstream worth building.

Capabilities

My expertise.

Full-time or fractional.

New revenue stream design
Conceive and architect new business lines inside existing organizations, from market hypothesis through launch to live revenue. For companies whose growth depends on net-new revenue, not just optimizing what's already there.
Operating model design
Design operating systems from scratch. For founders, acquired companies, and teams scaling past their current structure.
Go-to-market strategy
Positioning, launch sequencing, early customer acquisition. For new products and new lines of business.
Strategic partnership cultivation
Cold introduction to closed deal, including long-cycle enterprise and institutional sponsorships. For organizations building strategic partnerships from scratch.
AI-assisted strategic planning
Bring AI into how leadership sets strategy, runs reviews, and makes decisions. For exec teams that want to plan in days, not quarters.
Cross-functional alignment
Translate strategy into operating reality across engineering, GTM, finance, and program teams. For execs who need their teams pulling the same direction.
Post-acquisition integration
Lead the operating-model and value-creation work that determines whether an acquisition pays off. For acquired teams and acquirers alike.
Original research and analysis
Translate market signals into executive-ready narratives that decision-makers will actually read.
AI-native CRM design
Stand up Attio-based operational layers, integrated across functions and running on AI workflows. For organizations replacing legacy CRMs that no one actually uses.
AI prototyping for buy-in
Concept to working prototype in 2 to 7 days using Base44, Lovable, Cursor. Visible artifacts that move strategic conversations from abstract to tangible, accelerating executive buy-in and engineering teams alike.
Workflow automation architecture
Build Zapier and n8n systems that route data, trigger actions, and remove manual handoffs across teams. For teams losing hours to coordination friction.
AI and data skills mentorship
Coach junior operators on tech fluency, AI tooling, and data analytics. For teams investing in their own bench.
Currently

Open to full-time roles, fractional engagements, and advisory work.

Roles I'm exploring
Director of Strategic Initiatives · VP of Operations · Chief of Staff · AI Architect. Or anything where strategy, AI, new revenue creation, and execution come together.
Industries
Tech-forward, mission-aligned, fintech, ed tech, fem tech, healthcare. Slightly agnostic. What matters more is the work, the team, and whether we're building something that's actually going to run.
Location
Boston, remote, or anywhere with a good airport.
Get in touch →
My selected work

Six things I’ve built recently.

Each case is short on purpose. The deep version of any of these is a conversation I’d love to have.

01 / Operating infrastructure

An AI-native operating system inside a national investment firm.

The challenge

A national lending and investment firm with big plans needed an operating system that could keep up. When Pacific Community Ventures acquired my firm Radiant Data in 2025, I was retained to design an AI-native operating system the team could run on.

What I built

A CRM platform around Attio, integrated tech stacks across functions, AI-assisted planning frameworks, native data integrations that move the right data to the right people, and a library of workflow automations the team uses daily. An operating-system rewrite mid-flight, balancing scalability, reliability, extensibility, and speed for users at very different levels of tech fluency.

What it unlocked

New revenue streams that didn’t exist before the acquisition, real-time visibility for executive decision-making, and a team that uses AI as a default rather than a novelty.

OPERATING SYSTEM CRM · stacks · workflows
02 / Founding to acquisition

Building and selling Radiant Data.

The challenge

The CDFI industry needed access to machine learning, data analytics, and AI expertise that didn’t yet exist at the right price point or in trusted partnership models. Most professional services in this space were out of reach for community lenders and social-impact funders.

What I built

Radiant Data: co-founded in 2023 to democratize access to ML, data analytics, and AI professional services for the economic equity field. My co-founder and I built the firm from zero based on our industry and tech expertise: brand, positioning, operating model, delivery capability, and the thought leadership that established us as first movers and trusted partners for CDFIs and impact funders on AI and data infrastructure.

What it unlocked

Pacific Community Ventures acquired Radiant Data in 2025 and retained me to lead strategic partnerships and product innovation post-acquisition. I led the integration and the national launch of the Radiant Data Hub within PCV: a virtual town hall and multi-city roadshow through New York, DC, and San Francisco that convened 200+ investors, funders, and ecosystem leaders and generated $700K+ in philanthropic and earned-revenue pipeline. Today, Radiant Data operates as the Radiant Data Hub within PCV, and Anthropic selected to partner with PCV based on what we do at the Radiant Data Hub: providing a shared resource to a network of CDFIs that collects and synthesizes voice-based feedback from small business clients and their workers to improve products and services. Read the press release →

2023 founded 2025 acquired RADIANT DATA Two years, one exit
03 / Economic Research

America Blooms Where We Water Her.

The challenge

Where in the US are entrepreneurs ready and willing to build, but starved for the capital that would let them?

What I built

A methodology that crossed Bureau of Labor Statistics data on business formation with Raj Chetty’s research on economic connectedness, applying FIPS-level mapping to surface US counties where high entrepreneurship met thin access to capital. The output is a research narrative with interactive visualizations.

What it unlocked

The briefing has reached leadership at the US Department of Commerce, US Small Business Administration, World Bank, and The Atlantic Council. The skill that mattered was distilling millions of data points down into a clear, decision-ready picture. Finding the narrow cross-section where two coexisting conditions met, and showing exactly which counties they applied to. View the research story →

U.S. COUNTIES Where entrepreneurship meets thin capital high entrepreneurship + thin access to capital
04 / 0 → 1 product

An AI credit risk product, prototype to production.

The challenge

A national lender wanted to give underwriters better tools and let them responsibly take on more risk. The market hypothesis was clear; the product didn’t exist yet.

What I built

I conceived the product, built a working machine-learning credit risk model in two days using AI-native prototyping tools, validated the hypothesis with target customers, made the build-vs-buy and prototype-vs-scale calls, and partnered with engineering on production architecture. The two-day prototype compressed the production build from quarters to weeks.

What it unlocked

A live AI product now analyzing more than $15M in lending capital across the field, reducing underwriter effort and unlocking responsible risk-taking at the sector level. Seeing-is-believing in action: a working prototype made the strategic vision tangible enough to win executive buy-in.

CREDIT RISK · AI PRODUCT From 2-day prototype LENDING CAPITAL ANALYZED $15M+ across the field, and growing. 2-day prototype production
05 / Platform + partnership

A peer benchmarking platform for a specialized field.

The challenge

A specialized field needed a shared place where peers could benchmark against each other responsibly. Without it, leaders were making capacity, risk, and growth decisions without the comparative visibility that lets a sector advance together.

What I built

A peer benchmarking platform from scratch. I designed the product, the business model, the sponsorship model, and the go-to-market. I cultivated a sponsorship relationship with a publicly traded financial institution from a cold introduction I made 18 months ago. As of this writing, the sponsorship is near close.

What it unlocked

Member organizations get the comparative visibility they need to make sharper calls on risk, growth, and capacity. Sector-level data infrastructure that hadn’t existed before. The hardest part wasn’t the platform itself. It was the trust-building that made people want to use it.

PEER BENCHMARK Risk · Growth · Capacity your org peer 1 peer 2 peer 3 peer 4 peer 5 peer 6
06 / Service to product

A subscription coaching product, delivered through Claude.

The challenge

The professional services world has a productization problem: expertise gets trapped in live delivery, and revenue gets capped at the calendar. A respected LinkedIn thought leadership coach with strong enterprise clients and national awards had this problem at scale. Her high-touch service business was working, but it had no path to growth beyond her hours. She needed a way to deliver her framework, coaching, and accountability to a new member base her one-on-one model couldn’t reach.

What I built

A subscription product that turns the coach’s methodology, frameworks, proprietary empathy research, and coaching expertise into a scalable system members access through Claude. I designed the net-new revenue stream end to end: the business model, the three-tier pricing architecture, and the full member lifecycle. Then I built the technical infrastructure. A custom MCP server on Anthropic’s Streamable HTTP transport retrieves each member’s stored voice profile and injects it into their Claude session, so the AI behaves as a writing coach trained specifically to that person. Stripe drives acquisition and cancellation, Resend handles onboarding, Supabase stores member voice profiles, and Railway runs the server. The whole pipeline runs without manual intervention.

What it unlocked

A new revenue stream that didn’t require adding hours. The coaching is delivered by the protocol, not the calendar. The product is launched and in pilot, with the operating infrastructure already running every part of the member lifecycle. For the professional services field this matters: it’s a concrete path from consultant to founder, without a dev team and without giving up the depth that made the original practice valuable.

PRODUCT LINE Service, productized MEMBERS . . . CUSTOM MCP SERVER /coach voice profile CLAUDE coach Supabase Stripe RECURRING REVENUE · NO LIVE HOURS Delivered by the protocol, not the calendar.
Get in touch

The best way to reach me is email.

sarahmerion@gmail.com

Or find me on LinkedIn.