Melius Raises $25 Million to Put AI Agents Across the Whole Creative Production Pipeline

Melius, a startup building AI agents for creative production, announced on October 6 that it has raised $25 million — structured not as a single round but as two: a $5 million seed led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV, with participation from Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund. The combined raise is a bet that the next layer of value in generative AI for creative teams is not a better model, but the connective tissue between the idea and the finished asset.

The founding team comes out of fintech scale-up Ramp rather than a creative-tools incumbent. CEO Joowon Kim was a senior engineer at Ramp; CTO Young Kim, who also co-founded Venue (acquired by Ramp in 2023), was a director of engineering there; and COO Arnav Ramu previously worked in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim. The company emerged from stealth in July.

The founding thesis is a diagnosis of where creative work actually slows down. In Kim's framing, the constraint is not the quality of today's models but a resource problem: the skill required to write effective prompts, and the friction of shuttling between disconnected tools to get from concept to deliverable. Melius's answer is what it calls a shared creative operating system — a platform where teams of agents carry work from first draft through finished image, video or audio, while people keep the creative decisions.

The traction numbers are company-reported and should be read accordingly: Melius says it crossed a seven-figure annual run rate in under three months after emerging from stealth, without disclosing the exact figure or how it is calculated, and that thousands of teams use the platform daily to create brand assets. General Catalyst managing director Yuri Sagalov summed up the investment logic: "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."

The market Melius is entering is crowded and consolidating fast, from single-purpose image and video editors to enterprise platforms bundling generation with asset management. The company's wager is that orchestration — agents that handle the unglamorous steps between a brief and a broadcast-ready asset — is the layer where value compounds as models improve. The new capital is earmarked for hiring, expanding its agents lab, and building out sales and go-to-market. Whether the workflow layer can defend itself against the model providers moving up the stack is the open question; the round buys the team time to find out.