Ex-Ramp engineers raise $25M for Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns

Melius raises $25 million

Melius, a New York-based startup building an AI platform that generates ad campaigns, images and videos, has raised $25 million in total funding, according to TechCrunch. The company announced on Tuesday that the amount includes a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.

The startup also claims it crossed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July, TechCrunch reports.

A product the founders burned down

The funding caps an unusual first year. Melius was founded by three engineers — Joowon Kim, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu — who knew each other from working at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company.

When they first launched the company more than a year ago, the trio set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool that would help marketers manage and optimize ad spend. After more than six months of development, Joowon Kim told TechCrunch that the founders concluded the original idea did not have staying power.

Their response was drastic: rather than iterate on what they had, they scrapped the entire codebase and started again. Instead of helping advertisers allocate budgets, the new product would target the creative work itself — generating the images, videos and campaigns that fill those ad slots.

Nearly a year after the original launch, Melius unveiled the result: a platform the company describes as an "agents lab for creative work," where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can produce finished campaigns from plain-language prompts.

A crowded market with a big leader

Melius is far from alone in AI-powered creative generation for advertising. TechCrunch points to Higgsfield, a three-year-old competitor that reached a $5.4 billion valuation in August and has passed $700 million in annualized revenue, along with smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI.

Kim is not concerned by the competition. He acknowledged to TechCrunch that Higgsfield is "growing like mad," but argued that the market is large enough to sustain multiple winners. "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."

From failed vlogs to creative tooling

The founders' path into ad tooling has a personal streak. Kim, who describes himself as a social media influencer, told TechCrunch he has been interested in making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber. His early vlogs never took off — he noted that his father was skilled at FinalCut Pro while he was not — but the fascination with digital media persisted.

With Melius, Kim says he is effectively building the tool he always wanted: one that turns ideas into polished creative output without professional editing skills.

Why it matters

Melius sits at the intersection of two notable trends. The first is the explosion of AI tools for creative production, a market so large that investors valued one three-year-old participant at more than $5 billion and are still willing to back new entrants. The second is the willingness of a well-funded engineering team to delete a product entirely rather than salvage it, betting that speed toward the right market beats sunk-cost iteration.

The claimed $1 million in annualized revenue points to early demand, though the figure is self-reported and covers only two months out of stealth. Whether Melius can carve out durable space against a competitor of Higgsfield's scale will come down to execution — but as its founders see it, the market is big enough that the race has barely started.