New York-based Melius has raised $25 million in total funding to expand its AI-powered platform for creative teams.
The funding includes a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV. Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund also participated in the funding.
Melius said it will use the new capital to grow its team, strengthen its go-to-market and sales operations, and continue developing its AI agents lab.
“Watching Joowon, Young, and Arnav pivot and execute at speed showed exactly the kind of conviction and execution we look for in founders. 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. As AI agents get more capable, that full-workflow is where the advantage will compound,” said Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst.
“From our very first meeting, Joowon, Young and Arnav have been obsessed with one thing: helping people create exactly what they imagine with AI,” said CRV General Partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian. “That kind of clarity attracts great people, and we’ve been super impressed by how quickly they’ve brought A+ talent onto the team. With years of trust from building together at Ramp and a bias toward shipping fast, they’re exactly the team to win this market.”
AI Agents for Creative Work
Melius is building what it calls a shared creative operating system, where teams of AI agents handle time-consuming production work for images, videos, and audio.
The company believes that the main challenge with AI-generated visual content is no longer just the quality of AI models. Instead, creative teams still need prompt-engineering skills and often have to work across several disconnected tools.
Melius aims to simplify this process by allowing AI agents to handle much of the production work directly.
Melius Founding Team
Melius was co-founded by CEO Joowon Kim, CTO Young Kim, and COO Arnav Ramu.
Joowon Kim and Young Kim previously worked together at Ramp. Joowon was a senior engineer and social media influencer while Young served as Ramp’s director of engineering and was also a co-founder of Venue, a company acquired by Ramp in 2023.
Arnav Ramu is a multi-time entrepreneur who has also worked in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.
“Creative teams don’t have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem,” said Joowon Kim, co-founder and CEO of Melius. “Generative AI made content cheap to produce, but using it still means prompt-engineering your way through a dozen different tools. We built Melius so teams of AI agents handle everything between an idea and the finished asset, so people can spend their time being creative instead of operating tools.”
Melius Gains Early Traction
Melius launched its agents lab out of stealth in July 2026. In less than three months, the company said it has reached a seven-figure run rate, while thousands of teams are using the platform to create brand assets.
The company is based in New York and serves creative teams across multiple industries.
With its latest funding, Melius plans to expand its team and continue building AI agents designed to take over repetitive creative production tasks.
