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. The startup claims to have hit more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July.
Background
When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, co-founders Joowon Kim, 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, a corporate spending and finance software company. However, more than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn’t “have legs.”
““We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” said Joowon Kim.
New Direction
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. Nearly a year after its initial launch, Melius revealed a platform that it describes as an “agents lab for creative work.”
