{"id":873721,"date":"2026-10-07T08:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T08:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873721\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T08:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T08:28:08","slug":"ex-ramp-engineers-raise-20m-for-platform-melius-after-scrapping-their-first-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873721\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius after scrapping their first product"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melius<\/a>, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it 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.<\/p>\n

While the startup claims to have hit more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July, co-founder Joowon Kim (pictured on right) admits that Melius didn\u2019t hit it out of the park initially.<\/p>\n

When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, Kim and his co-founders, Young Kim (pictured on left) and Arnav Ramu (pictured center) set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool.\u00a0The three knew each other from working as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company.<\/p>\n

More than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn\u2019t \u201chave legs,\u201d Joowon Kim told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the team chose to focus on what it saw as a much larger opportunity: building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,\u201d Kim said. Melius quickly went to work on an entirely new product. Nearly a year after its initial launch, it revealed a platform that it describes as an \u201cagents lab for creative work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melius is far from the only startup helping ad agencies, marketers, and brands generate creative assets and campaigns with AI. Competitors include rapidly growing Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion<\/a> in August, as well as other small startups, including Krea and Flora AI.<\/p>\n

Kim isn\u2019t concerned about the competition.<\/p>\n

He acknowledged that Higgsfield, a three-year-old company that has hit over $700 million in annualized revenue, \u201cis growing like mad,\u201d but according to Kim, the size of the market is so large that it can support multiple competitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting,\u201d he told TechCrunch. \u201cThat means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for why former Ramp engineers are building an ad-generation product, Kim, who describes himself as a social media influencer, says he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried my best to make vlogs,\u201d he said. \u201cMy dad was great at using FinalCut Pro, but I wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those early vlogs never quite took off, but his fascination with making digital media remained.<\/p>\n

Now, with Melius, he\u2019s building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn their ideas into reality using plain language.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it raised a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[128852,28,41351,158,46327],"class_list":["post-873721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-ai-video","tag-business","tag-crv","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-general-catalyst"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}