Ex-Ramp Engineers Burned Their First Product to the Ground — Now Melius Has $25M to Build an “Agents Lab” for Creative Work
October 6, 2026 — Sometimes the best product decision is a bonfire.
Melius, an AI platform that generates ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced it has raised a total of $25 million: a $20 million Series A led by CRV on top of a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The founders — Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu, all former engineers at Ramp — got there by doing something most startups won’t: throwing away everything they’d built.
The pivot: from ad optimization to ad creation
When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, the team set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool — software to help marketers manage and optimize ad spend. After more than six months of building, the co-founders concluded the idea didn’t “have legs.”
Instead of iterating on a mediocre product, they went after what they saw as the much larger opportunity: generating the creative assets and campaigns themselves. “We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. Nearly a year after its initial launch, the rebuilt product emerged as what the company calls an “agents lab for creative work.”
The traction and the competition
The startup claims to have passed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July. That’s a respectable early signal, but the competition is serious: rapidly growing Higgsfield was valued at $5.4 billion in August with over $700 million in annualized revenue, and smaller startups like Krea and Flora AI are chasing the same market. Kim isn’t sweating it — he argues the market for AI-generated creative is big enough to support multiple winners.
Why it matters
This is one of the cleaner stories in AI this week because it’s honest about a hard truth: most AI startup value right now is in making things, not optimizing workflows around them. Marketers already have dashboards; what they want is the campaign itself. The “burned it all” pivot also signals a founder team with judgment — plenty of teams would have shipped the mediocre version and raised on the story anyway. The open question: can an “agents lab” stay differentiated when Higgsfield and every creative-tool incumbent are racing at the same target?
FAQ
What is Melius?
An AI platform from ex-Ramp engineers that generates ad campaigns, images, and videos — positioned as an “agents lab for creative work.”
How much did Melius raise?
$25 million total: a $20 million Series A led by CRV plus a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.
What happened to Melius’s first product?
After six-plus months of work, the founders scrapped the entire codebase for an AI performance-marketing tool, judging it had no legs.
Who does Melius compete with?
Higgsfield (valued at $5.4B in August), plus smaller players like Krea and Flora AI.
Sources: TechCrunch.