Analysis
Melius, an AI platform that generates ad campaigns, images and video, announced Tuesday that it raised $25 million in total funding, TechCrunch reported. The founders are engineers who previously worked at Ramp, the fintech Pulse has covered extensively, and scrapped their original product after building it, then rebuilt around AI-generated ad creative.
The round combined a $20 million Series A led by CRV with a separate $5 million seed led by General Catalyst.
The company claims it crossed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months of emerging from stealth in July — a fast ramp that, if it holds, would put Melius ahead of the typical pace for AI creative-generation startups at this stage. It competes in a crowded field that includes Higgsfield, Krea and Flora AI, all building tools that let marketing teams generate ad images and video without a traditional production budget.
“The round combined a $20 million Series A led by CRV with a separate $5 million seed led by General Catalyst.”
A product reset investors bet on anyway
Scrapping a first product and raising a fresh round on the rebuild is a harder sell than a straight-line Series A, since it signals the founders' first thesis didn't work. That CRV and General Catalyst both wrote checks suggests investors were buying the team and the pivot's early revenue traction more than the original idea — a pattern more common in AI tooling right now than it was a few years ago, as the pace of model improvement makes it easier to rebuild fast once a team finds the right wedge.
Melius didn't disclose a valuation for either round, and the ad-generation category it's entering has no shortage of well-funded competitors already targeting the same marketing-team buyer. The real test is retention: AI ad-generation tools have historically seen strong initial adoption from marketing teams experimenting with the technology, followed by churn once novelty wears off, so the $1 million ARR figure after two months says less about durability than about top-of-funnel interest.