Melius raises $25m to build AI agent platform for creative teams
Melius, a New York startup positioning itself as an AI agent platform for creative production, has announced $25 million in total funding. The raise comprises a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV, with participation from Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund. The company says it will use the capital to grow headcount, build out a go-to-market function and continue developing what it calls an "agents lab."
The company launched from stealth in July 2026. It reports crossing a seven-figure annual run rate within three months of that launch and says thousands of teams are now actively using the platform. No named customers or specific revenue figures were disclosed.
What Melius is building
The platform is described as a shared creative operating system in which teams of AI agents handle production tasks across image, video and audio, removing the need for prompt-engineering expertise or manual co-ordination across separate tools. The founding team's thesis is that the primary constraint on visual content production is not AI model quality but the fragmented tooling required to operate those models effectively.
Chief executive Joowon Kim, who previously worked as a senior engineer at Ramp, co-founded the company with Young Kim, former director of engineering at Ramp and co-founder of Venue (acquired by Ramp in 2023), and Arnav Ramu, who has prior experience in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim. The team's shared history at Ramp features prominently in investor commentary alongside the pace of execution since launch.
Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said the platform had moved beyond single-purpose generative tools: "Melius has now built a true operating system where agents can take a workflow from first draft to finished asset."
Market context
The AI-native creative tooling market has attracted substantial investment over the past two years, with a range of well-funded startups building point solutions across image generation, video editing, copy and audio. Established players including Adobe have also accelerated AI integration into their core creative suites, while platform consolidators are attempting to unify fragmented workflows. Melius is betting that a multi-agent, full-workflow approach will prove more defensible than single-purpose tools as underlying model capability commoditises.
That thesis is commercially plausible but carries execution risk. Enterprise creative teams frequently operate within procurement, brand-compliance and rights-management constraints that require more than workflow automation to address. The company has not disclosed its data-handling practices, model provenance or approach to copyright in generated assets, all of which are becoming material considerations for larger buyers following ongoing litigation in the US and evolving guidance from the UK Intellectual Property Office on AI-generated works.
The EU AI Act's transparency and traceability obligations for general-purpose AI systems will also bear on platforms that orchestrate multiple foundation models in production workflows. How Melius structures model attribution and auditability will matter as European enterprise sales become a target.