Melius Raises $20M After Ex-Ramp Founders Scrapped First AI Ad Product

New York-based AI startup Melius has closed a $25 million funding round, comprising a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round backed by General Catalyst. The company, co-founded by former Ramp engineers Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu, announced the investment following a July stealth launch that has already generated over $1 million in annualized recurring revenue. Melius operates in the expanding artificial intelligence marketing sector but emerged from a decisive strategic pivot. Initially, the founding team developed an AI-driven performance marketing tool designed to help advertisers manage and optimize budget allocation. After six months of development, the co-founders determined the original concept lacked sufficient market traction and subsequently dismantled the existing codebase. The team redirected its engineering efforts toward building an AI-powered creative generation platform, now positioned as an agents lab for end-to-end campaign and asset creation. The current platform enables users to generate advertisements, images, and video content through natural language prompts. Co-founder Joowon Kim, who has long expressed a personal interest in digital media production, positioned the tool as an accessible solution that allows both novice creators and experienced creative directors to translate conceptual ideas into polished marketing assets without specialized technical software. Melius enters a competitive landscape that includes high-growth rivals such as Higgsfield, which achieved a $5.4 billion valuation and over $700 million in annualized revenue, alongside emerging players like Krea and Flora AI. Despite the crowded market, Kim maintains that the total addressable space for AI-generated creative content remains sufficiently large to support multiple industry leaders. The presence of numerous entrants signals strong enterprise demand and validates the commercial viability of automated creative workflows. The funding round underscores investor confidence in Melius’s pivot strategy and its ability to capture early market traction. By transitioning from ad spend optimization to generative creative infrastructure, the startup positions itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and digital marketing production. As traditional advertising workflows continue to digitize, Melius aims to streamline the creative pipeline, offering brands and agencies a scalable alternative to conventional content development cycles.