Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images and videos, says it has raised $25 million in total: a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The New York company claims it passed $1 million in annualised revenue within two months of leaving stealth — after a hard reset.
The founders, Joowon Kim, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu, met as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. Their first product, launched more than a year ago, was an AI-powered performance marketing tool meant to help marketers manage and optimise ad spend. More than six months in, the team decided the idea "didn't have legs."
"We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," Joowon Kim said. Instead of optimising spend, Melius now builds what the team judged the larger opportunity: the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves. Nearly a year after its initial launch it revealed a platform it describes as an "agents lab for creative work."
The field is crowded. Competitors include Higgsfield, valued at $5.4 billion in August and, by Kim's own account, growing past $700 million in annualised revenue, plus smaller players such as Krea and Flora AI. Kim says the market is big enough to support multiple competitors: "There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting. That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space."
Melius is also a familiar shape of founding story: a first idea that survived six months of building, an open decision to abandon it, and a full replacement of the code before raising for the second thesis.
