Melius AI Agents Lands $25M for Creative Work

NEW YORK — Melius AI Agents, a startup that bills itself as the first agents lab for creative work, has raised $25 million in total funding, according to a company announcement carried by GlobeNewswire on October 6, 2026. The raise combines a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst with a $20 million Series A led by CRV, with Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund also participating.

Melius AI Agents gives creative teams a shared creative operating system in which teams of AI agents handle the busywork of production — building images, video, and audio — so human teams can spend their time imagining, according to the company's announcement. The company says the new capital will go toward growing the team, building out its go-to-market and sales organization, and continuing to expand the agents lab.

From performance marketing to an agents lab

The company did not start out as the Melius AI Agents it is today. According to TechCrunch's reporting on the funding, co-founders Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu — former engineers at the fintech company Ramp — first set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool. After more than six months of development, the team concluded the idea lacked traction and scrapped the entire codebase.

The rebuild targeted what the founders saw as the larger opportunity: agents that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves, rather than agents that merely help marketers manage ad spend. Melius came out of stealth with the new agents-lab product in July 2026. Less than three months later, the company says it has crossed a seven-figure annualized run rate, with thousands of teams building creative assets on the platform daily, according to the announcement. TechCrunch's reporting places annualized revenue above $1 million within two months of the stealth exit.

The thesis: agents beat another prompt box

The founders' argument is that the real bottleneck in visual content is not model quality. Instead, it is the friction of using today's models, which still demands prompt-engineering skill across a patchwork of disconnected tools, according to the company's announcement. Melius AI Agents is designed to remove that burden by having agent teams do the production work directly — carrying a brief from first draft to finished asset.

Investors framed the bet the same way. General Catalyst managing director Yuri Sagalov described most generative AI tools for creative teams as single-purpose — a prompt box here, an editor there — while Melius built an operating system where agents can own a full workflow, according to the announcement. CRV general partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian pointed to the team's speed in shipping after the pivot and its track record of building together at Ramp, according to the same announcement. Joowon Kim serves as CEO, Young Kim as CTO, and Arnav Ramu as COO.

A crowded field of creative agents

Melius AI Agents enters a market that is already filling fast. TechCrunch's reporting named competitors including Higgsfield, which was valued at $5.4 billion in August with more than $700 million in annualized revenue, alongside smaller startups such as Krea and Flora AI. Kim's view, as reported by TechCrunch, is that the creative market is large enough to support several winners.

The raise also extends a busy season for agentic startups more broadly. Enterprise suites keep adding agent layers, from SAP's new Joule AI agents across the enterprise suite, to consumer plays like the Virtuals Protocol iOS app that gives AI agents a wallet. Melius AI Agents stakes its claim in the creative corner of that land grab.

What comes next

With fresh capital, Melius plans to scale headcount, deepen its go-to-market motion, and keep building out the agents lab itself. For the agent ecosystem, the Melius AI Agents story is another data point in a visible shift: away from single-purpose AI tools and toward multi-agent operating systems that own a full workflow end to end. Whether creative teams trust agent teams with their brand assets at scale is the experiment the next year of spending will answer.