Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius

Artificial intelligence startups continue to attract significant investments as former engineers from corporate finance software company Ramp secure fresh capital for their new venture. Melius, an AI platform designed to generate advertising campaigns, images, and videos, announced that it raised a total of 25 million dollars in funding, which includes a 20 million dollar Series A led by CRV and a 5 million dollar seed round led by General Catalyst.

Based in New York, the startup launched over a year ago. Co-founders Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu originally crossed paths while working as engineers at Ramp. More than six months after developing their initial product, the team chose to abandon the original idea because they concluded it lacked long-term viability.

Instead of focusing on marketing spend management, the co-founders shifted their attention toward building tools that directly generate creative assets and advertising campaigns. This pivot targeted a substantially larger market opportunity in the advertising sector.

"There are a lot of players, which is pretty exciting. That means there are customers to be won and there is demand in this space."

Joowon Kim

Melius operates in a crowded market alongside competitors like Higgsfield, which reached a valuation of 5.4 billion dollars, as well as smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI. Although Higgsfield has scaled rapidly with annualized revenue exceeding 700 million dollars, Joowon Kim remains unfazed by the competition, noting that the market is expansive enough to support multiple players.