Melius Raises $25M After Founders Burned Their First Product and Rebuilt From Scratch

That gamble appears to have paid off. Melius announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $25 million in funding, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst, to build what it calls an "agents lab for creative work".

Melius first launched more than a year ago with a tool meant to help marketers manage and optimize advertising spend.

Co-founders Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu — who had met as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending software company — spent over six months building the product before concluding it had no future.

"We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. Instead of helping brands manage their ad budgets, the team pivoted to a bigger bet: building the AI tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves.

Nearly a year after that first launch, Melius came out of stealth in July with a platform where users describe what they want in plain language and AI agents do the production work — generating ad campaigns, images, and videos without a traditional creative toolkit.

"Ideas die in the not-knowing-where-to-begin, the fear of failure, the seemingly insurmountable gap between start to finish. We deserve better," Joowon Kim wrote in the company's announcement. The premise is that creative professionals should not need to learn complex software to realize an idea.

In practice, that means typing something like "expose a more natural lighting" and letting AI agents handle the detailed production decisions — what Kim describes as agents whose whole job is to take the thing in a person's head and do the labor of getting it out.

The startup says it crossed more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of emerging from stealth.

Melius is entering a field that has become one of the busiest corners of applied AI. Competitors include rapidly growing Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August and has surpassed $700 million in annualized revenue, along with smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI.

Kim does not seem worried. He acknowledged that Higgsfield "is growing like mad," but argued that the market for AI-generated creative work is large enough to support multiple winners. "There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting," he said. "That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space."

Whether Melius can win those customers will depend on something the founders already learned once: knowing when a product is not working. This time, they are betting they have it right.