Melius Raises $25 Million to Automate Creative Production With AI Agents

Melius has secured $25 million in total funding to build a business around AI agents that handle creative production. Announced October 6, 2026, the financing combines a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst and a $20 million Series A led by CRV, backing the startup’s push from individual tools toward shared workflows.

Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures and Anti Fund also participated. The announcement presents the seed and Series A together as one funding total, rather than a single $25 million round.

A production bottleneck, not an ideas shortage

The company’s starting point is a diagnosis of creative work: its founders believe the main obstacle to producing visual content is not today’s AI-model quality. It is the skill needed to write effective prompts and the effort of working across disconnected tools. CEO Joowon Kim describes that as a resource problem rather than an ideas problem.

Melius describes its response as a shared creative operating system: software where teams of AI agents handle production work for images, video and audio. Kim says the goal is to have those agents manage the work between an idea and a finished asset, leaving people to focus on creative decisions.

Kim founded Melius with CTO Young Kim and COO Arnav Ramu. Joowon and Young previously worked together at Ramp, as a senior engineer and director of engineering, respectively. Young also co-founded Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023. Ramu’s background includes entrepreneurship, software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.

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, in Melius’s funding announcement

Early traction after July’s debut

Melius came out of stealth in July 2026. It says it crossed a seven-figure run rate less than three months later and that thousands of teams now use the platform daily to build brand assets. The announcement does not give an exact run-rate figure or explain how that measure was calculated.

CRV general partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian highlighted the founders’ focus on helping people create what they imagine with AI. They also pointed to rapid hiring and the team’s shared history at Ramp as reasons for backing the company.

More staff and a larger sales operation

Melius says it will use the funding to grow its team, build its sales and go-to-market organization, and expand its agents lab. Its stated spending plan therefore covers both continued development and the commercial work of bringing the system to more customers.