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Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius after scrapping their first product. Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the company is focusing on building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaig Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it raised a total of $25 million in funding, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. While the startup claims to have hit more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July, co-founder Joowon Kim (pictured on right) admits that Melius didn't hit it out of the park initially. When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, Kim and his co-founders, Young Kim (pictured on left) and Arnav Ramu (pictured center) set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool. The three knew each other from working as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. More than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn't "have legs," Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the team chose to focus on what it saw as a much larger opportunity: building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves. "We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," Kim said. Melius quickly went to work on an entirely new product. Nearly a year after its initial launch, it revealed a platform that it describes as an "agents lab for creative work." Melius is far from the only startup helping ad agencies, marketers, and brands generate creative assets and campaigns with AI. Competitors include rapidly growing Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August, as well as other small startups, including Krea and Flora AI. Kim isn't concerned about the competition. He acknowledged that Higgsfield, a three-year-old company that has hit over $700 million in annualized revenue, "is growing like mad," but according to Kim, the size of the market is so large that it can support multiple competitors. "There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting," he told TechCrunch. "That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space." As for why former Ramp engineers are building an ad-generation product, Kim, who describes himself as a social media influencer, says he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber. "I tried my best to make vlogs," he said. "My dad was great at using FinalCut Pro, but I wasn't." Those early vlogs never quite took off, but his fascination with making digital media remained. Now, with Melius, he's building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn their ideas into reality using plain language.

Melius, a New York-based agents lab for creative work, has raised $25 million in total funding. The round includes $5 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst and $20 million Series A led by CRV, with participation from Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund. The company provides creative teams with an operating system where AI agents handle production busywork. Melius aims to eliminate the need for prompt-engineering across multiple disconnected tools by having agents manage everything between an idea and the finished asset. Co-founded by CEO Joowon Kim, CTO Young Kim, and COO Arnav Ramu, Melius emerged from stealth in July 2026. Within three months, the company crossed a seven-figure run rate with thousands of teams using the platform daily. The funding will support team growth, sales organisation expansion, and further development of its agents lab.

Melius raises $25 million for the first agents lab for creative work. The company crossed a seven-figure run rate in under 3 months after introducing agentic creative operating system. October 06, 2026 09:00 ET | Source: Melius NEW YORK, Oct. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Melius, the first agents lab for creative work, today announced $25 million in total funding. The funding includes $5 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, and $20 million Series A led by CRV. Other participating investors include Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund. Melius will use the new funding to grow its team, build out its go-to-market and sales organization, and continue expanding its agents lab. Melius gives creative teams a shared creative operating system where teams of AI agents handle the busywork of creative production. The company was built on the cofounders' belief that the real bottleneck on visual content isn't the quality of today's AI models, it's that using them still takes prompt-engineering skill and a patchwork of disconnected tools. Melius removes that burden with agents doing the production work directly. "Creative teams don't have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem," said Joowon Kim, co-founder and CEO of Melius. "Generative AI made content cheap to produce, but using it still means prompt-engineering your way through a dozen different tools. We built Melius so teams of AI agents handle everything between an idea and the finished asset, so people can spend their time being creative instead of operating tools." Melius was co-founded by CEO Joowon Kim, CTO Young Kim, and COO Arnav Ramu. Joowon and Young worked together previously at Ramp: Joowon as a senior engineer and social media influencer, and Young as the company's director of engineering and a co-founder of Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023. Ramu is a multi-time entrepreneur and also worked in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim. In July 2026, Melius came out of stealth with its agents lab. Less than three months later, the company has crossed a seven-figure run rate and thousands of teams are now actively building their brand's creative assets on the Melius daily. "Watching Joowon, Young, and Arnav pivot and execute at speed showed exactly the kind of conviction and execution we look for in founders. While most generative AI tools for creative teams are single-purpose - a prompt box here, an editor there - Melius has now built a true operating system where agents can take a workflow from first draft to finished asset. As AI agents get more capable, that full-workflow is where the advantage will compound," said Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst. "From our very first meeting, Joowon, Young and Arnav have been obsessed with one thing: helping people create exactly what they imagine with AI," said CRV General Partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian. "That kind of clarity attracts great people, and we've been super impressed by how quickly they've brought A+ talent onto the team. With years of trust from building together at Ramp and a bias toward shipping fast, they're exactly the team to win this market." About Melius Melius is the first agents lab for creative work: a shared creative operating system where teams of AI agents handle the busywork of building images, video, and audio, so creative teams can spend their time imagining. Based in New York, Melius is used by thousands of creative teams across a variety of industries. For more information, visit melius.com.