Melius has raised $25 million to expand its AI-powered creative operating system, including 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.
The New York-based company plans to use the funding to grow its team, expand its go-to-market and sales organization, and continue building out its agents lab for creative work.
Melius provides creative teams with a shared operating system where teams of AI agents can handle much of the production work involved in developing creative assets. The company is designed to reduce the need for users to work across multiple disconnected generative AI tools or rely heavily on prompt engineering.
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, while Ramu has experience as an entrepreneur as well as in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.
The company emerged from stealth in July 2026 and reached a seven-figure run rate less than three months later. Thousands of teams are now using Melius to build creative assets.
Melius is focused on automating work across images, video, and audio so creative professionals can spend more time developing ideas while AI agents handle more of the production process.
KEY QUOTES:
“Creative teams don’t have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem. 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.”
Joowon Kim, Co-Founder And CEO Of Melius
“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.”
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. 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.”
Veronica Orellana And Reid Christian, General Partners At CRV
