Ex-Ramp Engineers Raise $25M for Melius After Scrapping First Product
New York-based Melius has secured $25 million in total funding—a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst—to scale its AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos.
Melius announced the raise on Tuesday, claiming it reached more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of emerging from stealth in July. But co-founder Joowon Kim acknowledges the startup didn’t hit it out of the park initially.
From Performance Marketing to Creative Generation
When the company first launched over a year ago, Kim and co-founders Young Kim and Arnav Ramu set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool. The three met while working as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company.
More than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn’t “have legs,” Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the team pivoted to what they saw as a much larger opportunity: building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves.
“We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” Kim said. Melius quickly began work on an entirely new product. Nearly a year after its initial launch, it revealed a platform it describes as an “agents lab for creative work.”
A Crowded but Expanding Market
Melius is far from the only startup helping ad agencies, marketers, and brands generate creative assets and campaigns with AI. Competitors include rapidly growing Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August 2026 after raising a $400 million Series B—quadrupling its valuation in just eight months. Other smaller players include Krea and Flora AI.
Kim isn’t concerned about the competition. He acknowledged that Higgsfield, a three-year-old company that has surpassed $700 million in annualized revenue, “is growing like mad,” but according to Kim, the market is large enough to support multiple competitors.
“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.”
A Founder’s Creative Roots
As for why former Ramp engineers are building an ad generation product, Kim—who describes himself as a social media influencer—says he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber.
“I tried my best to make vlogs,” he said. “My dad was great at using Final Cut Pro, but I wasn’t.”
Those early vlogs never quite took off, but his fascination with making digital media remained. Now, with Melius, he’s building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn their ideas into reality using plain language.
via TechCrunch AI