Melius Raises $25M After Ex-Ramp Engineers Pivot to AI-Powered Creative Platform

From Performance Marketing Flop to Creative AI Success

Melius, a New York-based AI platform for generating advertising campaigns, images, and videos, announced a $25 million funding round comprising a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round from General Catalyst. The startup, founded by three former Ramp engineers—Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu—has already achieved over $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of launching publicly in July, according to the founders' claims.

The path to this success, however, involved a dramatic pivot. The trio initially launched their company more than a year ago with a different vision: building an AI-powered performance marketing tool designed to help marketers manage and optimize advertising spend. After six months of development and market testing, the founders concluded their original concept lacked viability and decided to abandon the entire direction.

Joowon Kim characterized the decision bluntly, explaining that the team scrapped their complete codebase rather than attempt incremental improvements. This dramatic reset enabled them to redirect their efforts toward what they identified as a far larger market opportunity: creating the underlying tools and platforms that generate creative assets and advertising campaigns themselves, rather than managing their deployment.

Navigating a Crowded Competitive Landscape

Melius operates in an increasingly crowded market where multiple players are pursuing similar opportunities. The startup faces competition from Higgsfield, a three-year-old company valued at $5.4 billion as of August 2026, which has achieved over $700 million in annualized revenue and demonstrates rapid growth. Additional competitors include smaller platforms such as Krea and Flora AI, each targeting various segments of the creative automation space.

Despite this competitive intensity, Kim expressed confidence in the market's capacity to support multiple winners. He argued that the extraordinary size of the addressable market means that the presence of numerous competitors signals robust customer demand rather than a saturated opportunity. Kim acknowledged Higgsfield's impressive trajectory but suggested that the expansive nature of creative work automation creates room for differentiated platforms to thrive and capture distinct customer segments.

Personal Mission Meets Market Opportunity

Kim's motivation for building Melius extends beyond commercial calculation. He describes himself as passionate about video creation, tracing his interest back to elementary school when he dreamed of becoming a successful YouTuber. His early attempts at creating video blogs never gained traction, partly due to technical limitations—his father possessed proficiency with video editing software, but Kim struggled to master such tools.

This personal history directly informed Melius's product philosophy. The platform is designed to democratize creative production by enabling anyone—from casual users to experienced creative directors—to translate conceptual ideas into finished creative assets using natural language instructions rather than specialized technical skills. This accessibility-focused approach represents Kim's attempt to build the tool he himself wished had existed during his earlier creative pursuits, now positioned as a scalable product for the broader market.