This is a cost to them so they want to increase the likelihood that the startup will do something useful that will feed back into future revenue. There are not a lot of indicators that have reasonable validity and are easy to assess, so they've picked something where others have done some heavy lifting.
They are giving out of a serious amount of hardware, an angel or VC investment shows a sign of commitment. Now, I am not saying there aren't very successful and committed bootstrap startups, its just that Meraki needs a metric to filter companies.
This is a cost to them so they want to increase the likelihood that the startup will do something useful that will feed back into future revenue. There are not a lot of indicators that have reasonable validity and are easy to assess, so they've picked something where others have done some heavy lifting.
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