Melius Raises $25M for Creative Agent Platform

The first version of Melius did not survive its own founders’ judgment. After more than 6 months building an AI-powered performance-marketing product, the team decided the idea did not have enough room to run, scrapped the codebase, and rebuilt around a harder problem: helping creative teams carry an idea all the way into finished images, video, and audio.

That reset now has $25M behind it. Melius announced the total on October 6, 2026, combining a $5M Seed led by General Catalyst with a $20M Series A led by CRV. Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, Anti Fund, Guillermo Rauch, Kahlil Lalji, and other angels also participated.

The capital will support hiring, a larger go-to-market and sales organization, and continued development of what Melius calls an agents lab for creative work. The company is aiming at the space between a prompt that generates one asset and the production system required to turn a brief into a coherent campaign.

What Melius Raised

The $25M funding announcement is a combined disclosure rather than a single $25M round. General Catalyst led the $5M Seed, while CRV led the $20M Series A. Melius did not disclose a valuation or the individual check sizes from participating investors.

That distinction matters because the Series A is the new institutional event and the Seed is part of the total funding history. The structure also shows two different moments of conviction: General Catalyst backed the earlier company formation, and CRV led the larger round after the founders had reset the product and brought the new platform into market.

Melius says it will use the financing to grow its New York team, build sales and go-to-market capacity, and expand the product. The company’s official announcement identifies a 16-person team based in Chelsea and says the platform serves thousands of creative teams.

Why the Product Reset Matters

TechCrunch reported that Melius started with software for managing and optimizing ad spend. More than 6 months into the work, co-founder and CEO Joowon Kim said the team concluded the idea did not have legs. The founders burned the original codebase and shifted from optimizing the money behind campaigns to producing the creative work those campaigns need.

The change was substantial. Ad-spend software helps decide where capital should move, while creative-production software has to coordinate models, assets, brand context, revisions, and human approval across a workflow that rarely behaves like a clean sequence.

That is the commercial pressure underneath the funding. Generative models have made it easier to produce an image or video clip, but professional teams still have to select the right model, preserve visual and brand consistency, revise individual elements, organize files, and assemble the final work. Every handoff can lose context or turn a creative director into the operator of a growing tool stack.

How the Melius Platform Works

Melius is building a shared, node-based canvas where agents can plan and execute parts of a creative workflow while users keep visibility into the graph and control over individual steps. The company positions that approach as an alternative to moving among isolated prompt boxes, generation tools, editors, and asset libraries.

According to the company’s current product disclosure, Playground supports image, video, and audio exploration; Cast turns scripts into multi-scene videos; and the Agentic Asset Manager helps agents find, organize, and reuse creative material. An Agentic Creative Canvas and access through MCP, API, and CLI are also live.

The roadmap still contains important work. Melius lists an Agentic Timeline Editor and Elements, a layer for keeping brand assets, product details, and references available to agents, as forthcoming. Those features matter because the most difficult creative workflows involve continuity across many assets and revisions, not simply the quality of a single generation.

The Team Behind Melius

Melius was co-founded by Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu. Joowon Kim serves as CEO, Young Kim as CTO, and Arnav Ramu as COO.

Joowon Kim and Young Kim previously worked at Ramp. Young Kim had also co-founded Venue, a procurement software company acquired by Ramp in 2023, and later led and scaled Ramp’s procure-to-pay engineering organization. Arnav Ramu’s background includes earlier company-building, software investing at Hg, and investment banking at Guggenheim.

Those backgrounds give Melius a founding team with product engineering, operating, finance, and go-to-market experience. They also make the pivot more revealing: the founders chose to abandon a product after months of work instead of financing a thesis they no longer believed could support the company they wanted to build.

Traction and Competitive Context

Melius says it crossed a seven-figure run rate less than 3 months after emerging from stealth in July 2026. The company also reports that thousands of teams use the platform and names Doors.com, Slash, SkinnyDipped, and Shown Media among its partners. These are company-reported operating signals and have not been independently audited.

The category is already crowded. TechCrunch identifies Higgsfield, Krea, and Flora AI as competitors serving creative teams with generative-media tools. Large model providers and established creative-software companies are also moving deeper into image and video workflows, which means access to generation technology alone will not protect a new platform for long.

Melius is betting on orchestration, editability, and context. Its opportunity depends on whether a team can use the platform across a full campaign without losing brand judgment or rebuilding the workflow every time the underlying model changes.

What the Funding Signals

The round reflects a broader shift in AI software from generation toward coordination. The first wave of products competed on the quality of one output. The next layer is competing on whether agents can manage a sequence of work, preserve context, and remain controllable when a human wants to change one part without starting over.

For agencies, marketing teams, filmmakers, e-commerce operators, and growth organizations, that can become an economic question. Faster production only matters when the system reduces rework, supports more variants, and keeps the final output consistent enough to ship.

Melius has capital, early company-reported traction, and a founding team willing to reset the product when the first thesis failed. The coming work is less cinematic than the demos: building a system that produces more creative output while keeping the human judgment that separates a finished campaign from another folder full of generations.