Melius raises $25M after AI creative pivot

What did Melius announce on October 6?

Melius announced on October 6, 2026 that it raised $25 million in total funding from General Catalyst, CRV, Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund. The financing was split into a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV, according to the company’s announcement and reported coverage. The startup is based in New York and describes itself as "the first agents lab for creative work."

The company said it will use the capital to expand hiring, build out its go-to-market and sales organization, and keep developing its agents lab. Melius also said the announcement came after it had emerged from stealth in July 2026. The company’s announcement said the round also included angel investors such as Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and Kahlil Lalji, CEO of Natural.

What does Melius build?

Melius says it is building a shared creative operating system for teams, where AI agents handle the production work between an idea and a finished asset. The platform is designed around the company’s belief that the main bottleneck in visual content is not model quality, but the amount of prompt engineering and tool-switching required to get from concept to output.

In Melius’ own announcement, the company said its platform covers images, video and audio for creative teams. It also said its agents do the production work directly, with products including Playground for generating images, video and audio, Cast for turning scripts into multi-scene videos with AI actors and voices and an Agentic Asset Manager for finding, organizing and reusing creative assets. The company said its MCP, API and CLI are live for integrations, while an Agentic Timeline Editor and an Elements feature are coming soon.

Melius also said it works with customers including Doors.com, Slash, SkinnyDipped and Shown Media. Its pricing page lists a Team plan with 70,000 credits per seat, pooled across the team with a two-seat minimum, and an Enterprise plan with custom credits and volume discounts. The company said it is based in Chelsea, New York, and had a team of 16 at the time of the announcement.

Who founded Melius?

Melius says its co-founders are CEO Joowon Kim, CTO Young Kim and COO Arnav Ramu. The company said Joowon Kim and Young Kim previously worked together at Ramp, where Joowon was a senior engineer and Young was director of engineering. Melius said Young Kim was also a co-founder of Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023, while Arnav Ramu previously worked in software investing at Hg and in investment banking at Guggenheim.

The company’s backers said they were drawn in part to the founders’ background and hiring pace. CRV’s Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian said they were impressed by how quickly the founders brought talent onto the team, while also noting the years of trust the founders built working together at Ramp. General Catalyst’s Yuri Sagalov said Melius had pivoted and executed quickly and built a workflow-spanning operating system for creative teams.

How has the company changed since launch?

Melius’s current product is the result of a pivot. Earlier reporting from TechCrunch said the founders originally launched the company more than a year earlier with an AI-powered performance marketing tool aimed at helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend. After more than six months, Joowon Kim said the team decided the original idea did not "have legs," scrapped the codebase and rebuilt around creative asset and campaign generation.

That rebuild effort led to the platform Melius now describes as an agents lab for creative work. TechCrunch also reported that the company aims to let users turn ideas into output using plain language, and that competitors in the space include Higgsfield, Krea and Flora AI. Kim said he believes the market is large enough for multiple players and that competition is a sign of customer demand.

Melius said that less than three months after emerging from stealth, it had crossed a seven-figure run rate and was being used by thousands of teams daily. A separate report said the company had not disclosed the exact amount or calculation behind that run-rate claim. On its pricing page, Melius listed a Team plan with 70,000 credits per seat, pooled across the team with a two-seat minimum, and an Enterprise plan with custom credits and volume discounts.

What happens next for Melius?

The funding follows Melius’s pivot from ad-spend tooling to a broader creative-production platform. General Catalyst’s Yuri Sagalov described the product as a workflow-spanning operating system for creative teams, while the company said its next features include an Agentic Timeline Editor and Elements.

Melius said it is based in Chelsea, New York, and had a team of 16 at the time of the announcement. The company also said it was hiring across all functions as it continues to expand its platform for creative teams.

The raise gives Melius more room to hire, expand sales and go-to-market, and keep building the agentic workflow it says can handle the messy production steps in creative work. Melius said its goal is to let teams and their agents move from first draft to finished asset in one workflow.