Funding and Growth
Melius, 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.
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 admits that Melius didn’t hit it out of the park initially.
Pivot to Creative Tools
When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, Kim and his co-founders, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu, set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool. The three knew each other from working as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company.
More than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn’t have legs, Joowon Kim said.
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.
The team scrapped the entire codebase and went to work on an entirely new product. Nearly a year after its initial launch, it revealed a platform that it describes as an agents lab for creative work.
Market Landscape
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, as well as other small startups, including Krea and Flora AI.
Kim isn’t concerned about the competition.
He acknowledged that Higgsfield is growing rapidly, but according to Kim, the size of the market is so large that it can support multiple competitors.
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.
Background
As for why former Ramp engineers are building an ad-generation product, Kim says he has been passionate about making short videos since elementary school and once dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber.
He tried his best to make vlogs, but found video editing challenging.
Those early vlogs never quite took off, but his fascination with making digital media remained.
Now, with Melius, he’s building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, including seasoned creative directors, can turn their ideas into reality using plain language.
