Ex-Ramp engineers raise $25M for AI ad platform Melius

Melius, an AI platform that generates ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it has raised a total of $25 million — a $20 million Series A led by CRV on top of a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.

The New York-based startup says it crossed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July. But the company's co-founder Joowon Kim admits that Melius did not succeed on its first attempt. The product investors are now backing is the startup's second act — built after the founders discarded more than six months of work and, in Kim's words, torched everything they had written.

The raise lands in one of the most crowded and better-funded corners of applied AI: generative tools for advertising creative. Competitors include Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August and, according to Kim, has surpassed $700 million in annualized revenue, alongside smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI. CRV and General Catalyst are effectively betting that this market is large enough to support several winners at once — a bet Kim explicitly endorses.

Who is behind Melius?

The three co-founders — Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu — met as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. Their engineering background at one of New York's fastest-growing fintechs gave them the technical foundation for an AI product; their decision to leave and build in advertising came from a different instinct entirely.

When the company first launched over a year ago, the founders set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool — software to help marketers manage and optimize ad spend. They spent more than six months building it. Then they concluded the idea did not have a future.

The original product "didn't have legs," Joowon Kim told TechCrunch.

That assessment forced the team to make a decision that most early-stage founders avoid: abandon the thing they had already built.

Why did the founders burn their first product?

After six-plus months of development, the co-founders decided that optimizing ad spend was the wrong target. The larger opportunity, as they saw it, was upstream — generating the creative assets and the campaigns themselves, rather than managing the budgets behind them.

So they deleted everything.

"We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," Kim said.

The team then went to work on an entirely new product. Nearly a year after its initial launch, Melius revealed a platform it describes as an "agents lab for creative work" — a system for producing the ads, images, and videos that marketers and agencies would otherwise commission or assemble by hand.

The pivot is the story behind the numbers. Melius claims more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of emerging from stealth in July, a traction figure that likely helped anchor the $20 million Series A from CRV. The earlier $5 million seed, led by General Catalyst, had funded the team through the false start and the rebuild.

What is the competitive picture?

Melius enters a market with at least one formidable incumbent-in-waiting. Higgsfield, a three-year-old company in the same broad space, was valued at $5.4 billion in August. Kim acknowledged that Higgsfield, which he says has hit over $700 million in annualized revenue, "is growing like mad."

But Kim argues the market can support multiple competitors, and he frames the crowding as a positive signal rather than a threat.

"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."

That argument has precedent. Advertising creative is a massive, recurring expense for brands, and generative AI tools that compress the cost and time of producing campaign assets — copy, images, video — have attracted sustained venture funding across the sector. Melius's $25 million total raise is modest next to Higgsfield's $5.4 billion valuation, but it positions the startup to compete for the same agencies, marketers, and brands that are actively shopping for AI generation tools.

The stakes for investors are straightforward: if demand for AI-generated creative is as broad as Kim claims, early revenue traction — even at $1 million in annualized revenue — is a leading indicator of which platforms agencies will standardize on.

Why are ex-Ramp engineers building ad software?

Kim's own explanation is unusually personal for a founder with a fintech engineering résumé. He describes himself as a social media influencer and says he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school. He 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."

The vlogs never took off. The fascination with making digital media did.

Kim says Melius is, in effect, the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone — including seasoned creative directors — can turn their ideas into finished creative work using plain language.

What comes next?

With $25 million in total funding and a claimed $1 million-plus in annualized revenue eight weeks after launch, Melius now faces the task of proving its second product has more staying power than its first — in a market where at least one competitor is growing at a scale measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.