Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius after scrapping their first product

Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the company is focusing on building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns. Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it raised a total of $25 million in funding, including a $20 million Series A led by CRV and a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. While the startup claims to have hit more than $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of coming out of stealth in July, co-founder Joowon Kim (pictured on right) admits that Melius didn’t hit it out of the park initially. When the New York-based company first launched over a year ago, Kim and his co-founders, Young Kim (pictured on left) and Arnav Ramu (pictured center) set out to build an AI-powered performance marketing tool.

The three knew each other from working as engineers at Ramp, the corporate spending and finance software company. More than six months after building the product, the co-founders decided their original idea didn’t “have legs,” Joowon Kim told TechCrunch. Instead of helping marketers manage and optimize ad spend, the team chose to focus on what it saw as a much larger opportunity: building the tools that generate the creative assets and campaigns themselves. “We scrapped the entire codebase;