Ex-Ramp Engineers Raise $25M for AI Ad Platform Melius After Scrapping Original Product
After scrapping six months of work, three former Ramp engineers rebuilt Melius from scratch around AI-generated ad creative. The startup surpassed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of launching in July 2026 and has raised $25 million.
Melius, a New York-based AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced in October 2026 that it has raised a total of $25 million in funding — a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
The company was founded by three former engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company: Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu. When Melius first launched more than a year ago, the team set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool to help marketers manage and optimize ad spend. After more than six months of development, the co-founders concluded the original idea didn’t “have legs” and made the decision to start over entirely.
“We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” co-founder Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. The team rebuilt from scratch, and in July 2026, Melius came out of stealth with a platform it describes as an “agents lab for creative work” — focused on generating the creative assets and campaigns themselves rather than optimizing ad spend.
The company says it surpassed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of that launch. Melius operates in a competitive market that includes Higgsfield, valued at $5.4 billion in August 2026 and reporting over $700 million in annualized revenue, as well as smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI. Kim acknowledged Higgsfield “is growing like mad” but said the market is large enough to support multiple players.
“There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting,” Kim said. “That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space.”
Kim, who describes himself as a social media influencer, says a long-standing interest in digital video creation motivated the product’s direction. He envisions Melius as a platform where anyone — including seasoned creative directors — can turn ideas into finished creative work using plain language.