Michael Gilroy

Gilroy joined the venture firm Canaan in 2014 and became a core member of its enterprise and fintech investment teams. As an associate, he sourced the firm’s investments in Arbor and Bellhops and worked closely with companies such as Rocketrip and Tubular.⁠[1][1]

Then a principal at Canaan Partners, Gilroy published an opinion piece in American Banker noting that total global fintech venture funding and fintech-related M&A deals had fallen by nearly 50% between 2015 and 2016, to $25 billion, suggesting that the low-hanging fruit in consumer products was gone. He argued that instead of investing in consumer-facing products, money should go into critical yet less glamorous back-end infrastructure.⁠[2][3][3][2]

Canaan announced Gilroy’s promotion to partner. In his four and a half years at the firm, he moved from its New York office to San Francisco and led investments in, and served on the boards of, machine learning compliance company Beam, digital analytics company ContentSquare, pay-as-you-drive insurtech platform Hugo, and SMB SaaS platform ScaleFactor. He also supported the fintech community through FinTech Central, a quarterly event series held on both coasts, whose speakers included Jackie Reses of Square and Zach Perret of Plaid.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2019, Gilroy left Canaan to join Coatue, a technology investor across both private and public markets. He led fintech investments at Coatue, investing in companies including Arta Finance, Melio, Pinwheel, and Mercury. As of February 2023, he was Co-Head of Growth Investing and Head of Fintech; he co-published “Fintech & the Pursuit of the Prize,” an assessment of the fintech sector presented at Money 20/20 in 2022, and discussed on a podcast Coatue’s proposed “Rule of 200” for fintech investments.⁠[4][5][4][4][5][5][5]

Meld, a fintech API platform, was co-founded by Pankaj Bengani, who previously ran Square’s platform and partnerships team, and others. It brings third-party services such as payments, crypto, and bank linking together into a single API and dashboard. When Meld came out of stealth in May 2022, it announced an $8 million seed round led by Coatue, which had closed in early Q2 2021, with more than 20 angel investors, including DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram, also participating; Gilroy led the investment for Coatue.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

In November 2024, Gilroy, by then formerly of Coatue, was forming a yet-to-be-named venture firm with longtime tech executive and angel investor Gokul Rajaram, with plans to begin fundraising toward a $400 million to $500 million debut fund in early 2025 to invest in U.S.-based early-stage fintech and software startups.⁠[4][4][4]

On January 9, 2025, Gilroy and Rajaram each announced the launch of their new firm, Marathon, on X. Gilroy said the fund would rarely speak publicly, because the founders building all of the enterprise value are the center of the ecosystem and the only ones who should be making news. Rajaram said Marathon would invest in and support founders who are obsessed with the problem they are solving and understand their customers better than anyone else.⁠[7][7][8][8]

On April 24, 2025, Marathon Management Partners Fund I, LP, a limited partnership organized in Delaware in 2024, filed a Form D with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a venture capital fund with a total offering amount of $400 million; Rajaram and Gilroy were both listed as executive officers, in the capacity of managing members of the general partner.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

An amended filing submitted on April 23, 2026, showed that the fund’s date of first sale was April 25, 2025, that the total offering amount had been revised to $250 million, that $205.935 million had been sold, and that 143 investors had already invested.⁠[10][10][10][10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/MBGilroy (opens in a new window)⁠[2]