Melius, a New York startup building what it calls an "agents lab" for creative production, announced on October 6 that it has raised $25 million across two back-to-back rounds: a $5 million seed led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV. The company also disclosed that it crossed a seven-figure annualized run rate within two months of launching publicly in July 2026.
The fundraise reflects growing investor confidence in platforms designed to let AI agents handle complex, multi-modal creative tasks. Melius operates in a crowded and well-funded space. Higgsfield, for instance, raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in August 2026, TechCrunch reported at the time.
A Canvas for AI Collaboration
Melius describes its platform as a shared creative operating system. Users feed plain-language briefs into the system, and AI agents generate images, video, and audio in response. The interface centers on a node-based canvas where outputs can be arranged and refined.
One feature, called Cast, converts written scripts into multi-scene videos populated by AI-generated actors and voices. An agentic asset manager stores brand guidelines and context, allowing the system to maintain consistency across projects. The company also offers API, command-line, and Model Context Protocol integrations so external agents from tools like Claude and ChatGPT can plug into Melius canvases. A Slack agent is already live, and the company said a timeline editor and brand-asset library are coming soon.
From Ramp to Rapid Pivot
The founding team—CEO Joowon Kim, CTO Young Kim, and COO Arnav Ramu—all worked as engineers at Ramp, the corporate-spend platform. Young Kim previously co-founded Venue, a procurement startup that Ramp acquired in January 2024. Ramu's background includes stints in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.
The trio didn't land on Melius immediately. They scrapped an earlier product entirely. "We burned all of it," Kim told TechCrunch. The current platform emerged from roughly a year of stealth development on a fresh codebase before going public in July 2026.
Revenue Ramp and Early Customers
Melius reached a run rate exceeding $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of exiting stealth, TechCrunch reported. The company lists Doors.com, Slash, SkinnyDipped, and Shown Media among its customers but declined to share valuation details or granular customer metrics.
The startup now employs 16 people, according to Kim's October 6 blog post, though LinkedIn shows 11–50 employees as of September 2026. Pricing starts at $17 per month for individual creators on a credit-based tier structure and scales to custom enterprise plans.
Who's Backing It
General Catalyst Managing Director Yuri Sagalov led the seed round. CRV General Partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian led the Series A. Other participants include Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund, plus individual backers Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and Kahlil Lalji, CEO of Natural.
"Melius has now built a true operating system where agents can take a workflow from first draft to finished asset," Sagalov said in the company's announcement.
Competing in a Hot Market
Melius positions itself against established players like Adobe and Canva, as well as AI-native competitors including Flora AI—which offers a canvas-native agent called FAUNA—and Krea, which released Krea 2 in mid-2026. The creative-AI segment has attracted substantial venture capital. Higgsfield's August 2026 Series B valued that company at more than 200 times Melius's reported run rate, though Higgsfield disclosed annualized revenue in the hundreds of millions, media reports indicated.
"Creative teams don't have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem," Kim said in the October 6 release.
The company plans to use the funding to expand headcount, build out go-to-market and sales teams, and extend the agents lab. Whether that's enough to carve out durable market share in a field already dominated by richly valued incumbents remains an open question.
