The Pulse
Melius Raises $25 Million After Scrapping Its First AI Product
Melius announced $25 million in funding on October 6, 2026, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The former Ramp engineers abandoned their first AI marketing product and rebuilt th
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Melius announced $25 million in funding on October 6, 2026, after its founders scrapped the startup’s first product and rebuilt it as an AI platform for creative work. The New York company’s financing combines a $20 million Series A led by CRV with a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
The pivot changed Melius’s aim from helping marketers manage and optimize advertising spend to generating the campaigns and creative assets themselves. Co-founder Joowon Kim described the reset to TechCrunch bluntly: “We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it.”
From ad-spend management to making the ads
Kim, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu began Melius more than a year ago as a performance-marketing product. The three had worked as engineers at corporate spending software company Ramp. After more than six months building the first product, they decided the idea did not “have legs,” Kim told TechCrunch.
Rather than keep refining a tool for managing ad spend, the founders shifted to producing the creative work that goes into campaigns. The team rebuilt its software and, nearly a year after its initial launch, introduced what Melius calls an “agents lab for creative work.” The product is intended to let people direct creative tasks in plain language, while AI agents handle production steps.
Five features are live; two are still to come
Melius’s announcement lists five available capabilities: Playground for generating images, video and audio; Cast for turning scripts into multi-scene videos; an asset manager that can find and organize creative files; a canvas for building and steering workflows; and connections through MCP, an API and a command-line interface. A timeline editor and Elements, a place to keep brand assets and product information, are listed as forthcoming rather than live.
The company’s pitch centers on coordinating work across those steps instead of offering only a single image or video generation tool. That puts it in a field that includes Higgsfield, Krea and Flora AI, according to TechCrunch. Kim acknowledged Higgsfield’s growth but told the outlet he sees room for multiple competitors.
Melius says annualized revenue topped $1 million
Melius claims it passed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July. That figure is the company’s own claim, not a disclosed audited revenue result. The announcement also names Doors.com, Slash, SkinnyDipped and Shown Media as partners, and says Melius has a team of 16.
The funding announcement lists General Catalyst and CRV alongside Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund, as well as individual investors including Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch. Melius says it plans to use the capital to expand its team, build out sales and go-to-market operations, and develop the agents lab further.
A reset with a larger creative remit
The company is now selling a broader proposition than its first product: not software for tuning ad spend, but a set of tools meant to carry creative work from an idea toward finished assets. Its current product combines generation, scripted video, asset organization and workflow-building; the timeline editor and brand-information feature remain on the company’s upcoming list.
For the founders, the clearest measure of the change is the code they left behind. Melius has raised $25 million for the rebuilt platform, while its original performance-marketing product is no longer part of the offer.