Former Ramp engineers threw out all their code and started from scratch: Melius has raised 25 million dollars for ads made by AI

New York startup Melius has raised a total of 25 million dollars (about 21.5 million euros): 20 million dollars in a Series A led by CRV and 5 million dollars in seed funding from General Catalyst. The AI platform generates ad campaigns, images and videos, and describes itself as "an agentic lab for creative work".

More interesting than the money is how they got there. The three founders - Joon Kim, Young Kim and Arnav Ramu, former engineers at Ramp, the corporate spend software company - set out more than a year ago to build a tool that helps marketers spend ad budgets more smartly. After more than six months of work, they concluded the idea "had no legs". "We threw out all the code, we burned it all down," says Joon Kim.

Instead of helping others manage their advertising, they decided to make it themselves - the copy, the images, the videos. According to the company, within two months of coming out of stealth in July, they had reached more than a million dollars in annualised revenue. That's a figure the startup reports itself, not an auditor.

The competition isn't small. Higgsfield, a three-year-old company, was valued at 5.4 billion dollars (about 4.65 billion euros) in August and has over 700 million dollars in annualised revenue. Smaller players Krea and Flora AI are in the same market. Kim admits Higgsfield is "growing like crazy", but he isn't worried: "There are a lot of players, which is exciting. It means there are customers to win and demand in this space." The market may be big enough for everyone today - how many will be left when the shake-out comes?

Why are engineers from financial software building a video tool? Kim, who describes himself as an influencer, says he dreamed of becoming a famous YouTuber ever since primary school. "I tried to make vlogs. My dad was great with Final Cut Pro, and I wasn't," he says. The vlogs didn't work out, but now he's building the tool he always wanted: a platform where anyone, even experienced creative directors, turns ideas into ads using plain language.

For marketing agencies in the Balkans that sell hours of filming and editing, this is a message worth reading twice. If one sentence is enough for a whole campaign, what will an editor's day of work be worth?