Melius is entering the crowded AI advertising market with fresh funding, a rebuilt product, and a sharper bet on creative work. The New York-based startup announced on Tuesday that it raised a total of $25 million, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
The company is now positioning itself as an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos. But its current direction came only after the founding team decided that its first product was not strong enough to carry the business forward.
From ad spend tools to creative generation
Melius was founded by Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu, who previously worked together as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. When the startup first launched over a year ago, the team set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool.
That original idea focused on helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend. More than six months into building it, the founders concluded that the product did not “have legs,” Joowon Kim told TechCrunch.
That decision pushed Melius toward a different part of the marketing workflow. Instead of optimizing how advertising dollars were allocated, the company shifted toward generating the creative assets and campaigns that those dollars would promote.
The pivot was not a small adjustment. Kim described the reset in direct terms: “We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it.”
That kind of move carries obvious risk for a young company. It means throwing away months of engineering work and accepting that the first version of the product missed the better opportunity. But it also gave Melius a cleaner path into the part of marketing where AI tools are drawing intense attention: the production of campaign concepts, visuals, and video assets.
The new Melius product
Nearly a year after its initial launch, Melius revealed a platform it describes as an “agents lab for creative work.” The company says the product can generate ad campaigns, images, and videos.
The pitch is built around plain-language creation. Kim said he is building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn ideas into reality using plain language.
That framing matters because Melius is not only speaking to technical users. Its market includes ad agencies, marketers, and brands, all of whom may want faster ways to move from campaign ideas to usable creative assets.
The source article does not detail the platform’s full feature set, pricing, or customer list. What is clear is the product direction: Melius wants to sit closer to the creative process itself, rather than simply measuring or optimizing the media spend around that process.
Funding follows the pivot
The company’s funding announcement puts real investor backing behind that strategic reset. Melius said it raised $25 million in total, split between the $20 million Series A led by CRV and the $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
The startup also claims it reached more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July. That revenue claim gives context to the timing of the Series A: Melius is presenting itself not just as a rebuilt product, but as one that found early commercial pull after the pivot.
The sequence is central to the story. Melius did not raise around a straight-line product journey. It raised after a major rewrite of the company’s direction, moving from performance marketing infrastructure toward AI-generated creative campaigns.
For investors, that suggests the current version of the company is the important one. For customers, it signals that the platform is being shaped around creative production, not just advertising analytics or budget management.
A crowded AI advertising market
Melius is not alone in chasing this opportunity. The AI creative tools market already includes other startups helping ad agencies, marketers, and brands produce creative assets and campaigns.
The source names several competitors:
- Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August.
- Krea, one of the smaller startups in the space.
- Flora AI, another smaller startup competing in AI creative generation.
Kim acknowledged the momentum around Higgsfield, calling it a three-year-old company that has reached over $700 million in annualized revenue and “is growing like mad.” Still, he argued that the market is large enough to support multiple companies.
His view is that competition can be read as demand. “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 is the core strategic bet behind Melius. The company is not trying to define an empty category. It is entering a field where other startups are already moving quickly, and where buyers appear to be exploring new ways to make creative work with AI.
The founder’s creative thread
The move into ad generation also has a personal angle for Kim. He describes himself as a social media influencer and told TechCrunch he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school.
He once wanted to become a famous YouTuber. “I tried my best to make vlogs,” he said. “My dad was great at using FinalCut Pro, but I wasn’t.”
Those early videos did not become a breakout success, but the interest in digital media stayed with him. Melius now reflects that long-running fascination, translated into a startup product aimed at making creative production easier through AI.
The company’s story is ultimately about a founder team willing to abandon one product in order to pursue a larger creative workflow. Melius began with ad spend optimization, but its present focus is more ambitious: helping users generate the campaigns and assets that shape how brands communicate.