Melius Raises $25M for an AI Agents Lab for Creative Work

Melius, a New York startup that uses teams of AI agents to produce images, video and audio for creative teams, announced $25 million in total funding on Tuesday, 6 October 2026. According to the company's press release, the money combines a $20 million Series A led by CRV with a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund also participating. Melius says it crossed a seven-figure annual run rate less than three months after coming out of stealth in July.

The company describes itself as "the first agents lab for creative work," a shared creative operating system in which agents handle production tasks that would otherwise require prompt-engineering skill across separate tools. It plans to use the funding to grow its team, build a go-to-market and sales organization, and expand the product.

What Melius says its agents do

In a post on the Melius blog, co-founder and CEO Joowon Kim framed the product around turning an idea into a finished asset without the crew, software skills and render time that production usually demands. His examples are plain-language instructions: asking for more natural lighting and having a whole video re-render, or asking for a meme variation in every language and having it fan out.

The blog lists the features Melius says are live today. Playground lets users explore ideas and generate images, video and audio with current AI models. Cast turns a script into a multi-scene video with AI actors, voices and scenes. An Agentic Asset Manager finds, organizes and reuses creative assets, and an Agentic Creative Canvas lets users build workflows with agents on a canvas they can steer and edit. Melius also offers an MCP server, API and command-line interface so it can plug into other agents and apps.

Two more features are marked as coming soon: an Agentic Timeline Editor, where agents assemble and edit video, audio and timing on a shared timeline, and Elements, which keeps brand assets, product details and references together for agents to use.

"Creative teams don't have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem," Kim said in the release. "Generative AI made content cheap to produce, but using it still means prompt-engineering your way through a dozen different tools."

A pivot from ad spend to ad creative

TechCrunch reported that the company's first product, launched more than a year ago, was an AI-powered performance marketing tool for managing and optimizing ad spend. More than six months in, the co-founders decided that idea did not "have legs," Kim told the publication, and turned to generating the creative assets and campaigns themselves. "We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," he said.

The three co-founders met at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. The release says Kim was a senior engineer and social media influencer there, while CTO Young Kim was Ramp's director of engineering and a co-founder of Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023. COO Arnav Ramu is described as a multi-time entrepreneur who previously worked in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.

In his blog post, Joowon Kim wrote that he and his co-founders started this version of Melius 219 days earlier and that the team now numbers 16, based in Chelsea, New York. TechCrunch reported that the startup claims more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth.

Investors, customers and the competitive field

The blog names angel investors including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Natural CEO Kahlil Lalji, and lists Doors.com, Slash, SkinnyDipped and Shown Media among its partners. The release says thousands of teams now build brand creative assets on Melius daily.

Investors in the round pointed to the full workflow as the draw. "While most generative AI tools for creative teams are single-purpose — a prompt box here, an editor there — Melius has now built a true operating system where agents can take a workflow from first draft to finished asset," said Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst. CRV general partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian said the founders "have been obsessed with one thing: helping people create exactly what they imagine with AI."

TechCrunch noted that Melius is far from the only startup in this space. It listed Higgsfield, which it said was valued at $5.4 billion in August and has passed $700 million in annualized revenue, among Melius's competitors, along with smaller startups Krea and Flora AI. Kim told TechCrunch that the market is large enough to support several companies. "There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting," he said. "That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space."

Why the founder built an ad-generation tool

TechCrunch reported that Kim, who describes himself as a social media influencer, has been making short videos since elementary school and once hoped to become a well-known YouTuber. "I tried my best to make vlogs," he said. "My dad was great at using FinalCut Pro, but I wasn't." TechCrunch described Melius as the tool Kim always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn ideas into finished work using plain language.

PromptCrates has covered related moves by other creative software companies, including Runway Ads, which automates performance creative across Meta, Google and TikTok, and Adobe putting 70 creative tools inside Slackbot.

• GlobeNewswire: Melius raises $25 million for the first agents lab for creative work
• Melius blog: Melius raises $25M to let anyone make anything
• TechCrunch: Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius after scrapping their first product
• PromptCrates: Runway Ads automates performance creative across Meta, Google and TikTok
• PromptCrates: Adobe puts 70 creative tools inside Slackbot