Picture this. You’ve spent more than six months building a product with two friends. The code works and the pitch makes sense. Then you look at it honestly and realize it doesn’t “have legs.” Most founders would pivot carefully and keep what they could. The Melius team deleted all of it.
“We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” co-founder Joowon Kim told TechCrunch AI. Investors seem to like the new version. On Tuesday, New York-based Melius said it has raised $25 million in total: a $20 million Series A led by CRV and an earlier $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
🔥 From ad spend to ad creation
Melius was founded by Joowon Kim, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu, who all worked as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance company. When they launched a little over a year ago, they were building an AI tool for performance marketing. It was meant to help marketers manage and optimize their ad spend.
After more than six months on it, they decided the idea was too small. The bigger opportunity, as they saw it, was making the ads themselves. So they started over and built a platform that creates ad campaigns, images and videos. Melius calls it an “agents lab for creative work.”
The new product came out of stealth in July. According to TechCrunch AI, the company says it passed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of that launch.
📊 Why this round matters
A $25 million raise isn’t huge by AI standards. What stands out is the speed and the signal. Here’s what the numbers tell us:
- Fast traction after a hard reset. Going from an abandoned codebase to $1M+ in annualized revenue in about two months shows strong demand for AI-generated creative.
- Top-tier backing. CRV and General Catalyst are both betting that this market can support more than one winner.
- The pivot was the right call. Optimizing ad spend is a crowded, analytics-heavy space. Generating the creative goes straight at the most expensive and slowest part of running ads.
That last point is the key one. For years, the bottleneck in performance marketing has been creative production. Brands need dozens of ad variations to test, and every one of them used to require designers, editors and time. AI tools that turn plain-language prompts into finished campaigns cut that cycle from weeks to minutes.
⚔️ A crowded and well-funded field
Melius has plenty of company. Its main competitors include:
- Higgsfield, valued at $5.4 billion in August and reportedly past $700 million in annualized revenue just three years in
- Krea, a smaller AI creative startup
- Flora AI, another early-stage player in AI-assisted creative work
Kim isn’t worried. He admits Higgsfield “is growing like mad,” but he argues the market is big enough for several winners. “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’s a reasonable read. Higgsfield’s revenue proves brands and creators will pay real money for AI-generated video and imagery. Still, Melius is entering a race where the leader is already hundreds of times bigger. It’ll need a clear edge, whether that’s better agent workflows, tools built for agencies, or tighter campaign-level output, to avoid becoming a feature on someone else’s platform.
🎬 The founder’s long game
Why are finance software engineers building an ad generator? Kim describes himself as a social media influencer. He’s been making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of being 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 vlogs never took off. But the frustration stuck with him, and Melius is his answer to it: a tool where anyone, from beginners to seasoned creative directors, can turn an idea into finished media using plain language.
👀 What to watch next
If you’re a marketer, expect the AI creative tools market to keep splitting into niches, with agent-based platforms that handle a whole campaign rather than single assets. If you’re a founder, Melius is a reminder that deleting months of work can be the fastest way forward.
The real test comes next: can Melius turn early revenue into lasting share against a $5.4 billion incumbent? You can find more details in the original TechCrunch AI report.