FundraiseOct 6, 2026, 18:01 UTC

Melius lands $20M Series A for its AI agents lab for creative teams

What's the deal? Melius, a New York startup building AI agents for creative work, has raised a $20 million Series A led by CRV. Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund also took part, bringing total funding to $25 million alongside a prior $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst.

What's the endgame? Melius offers creative teams a shared operating system where AI agents handle the production work of building images, video, and audio. The pitch: today's AI models are good enough, but using them still requires prompt-engineering skill and juggling disconnected tools.

What they said: "Creative teams don't have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem," said co-founder and chief executive officer Joowon Kim. The money will go toward hiring, building a go-to-market and sales team, and expanding the agents lab.

The numbers: Melius came out of stealth in July 2026. Less than three months later, it says it has crossed a seven-figure run rate, with thousands of teams using the product.

Why now? The founding team reunited from Ramp, where Kim was a senior engineer and co-founder Young Kim served as director of engineering. Young Kim also co-founded Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023; the third co-founder, Arnav Ramu, previously worked in software investing at Hg and banking at Guggenheim.

The signal: At $20 million, the round sits in the top 10% of all US media Series A deals on record, a sign of investor appetite for AI tools that move beyond single-purpose generators toward full-workflow automation. As CRV general partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian put it, the founders are "exactly the team to win this market."