The new financing, announced Tuesday (Oct. 6), will help Melius expand its platform, designed for people using artificial intelligence (AI) to create images, videos and ad campaigns.
“Transitioning from wanting to make something to actually making it has never been seamless,” Co-Founder Joowon Kim wrote in the announcement. “Ideas die in the not-knowing-where-to-begin, the fear of failure, the seemingly insurmountable gap between start to finish. We deserve better.”
The solution, Kim argued, is not “another tool with a learning curve, but a set of agents whose whole job is to take the thing in your head and do the labor of getting it out.”
That means saying things like “expose a more natural lighting” and letting “agents obsess over the menial tasks that never defined what it meant to be creative,” he added.
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A report on the new funding by TechCrunch notes that Melius didn’t set out to offer a tool for creative professionals.
Kim and co-founders Young Kim and Arnav Ramu — all veterans of spending/finance software company Ramp, where they worked as engineers — had wanted to create an AI-powered performance marketing tool.
But after six months of work, the trio decided the idea didn’t “have legs,” Joowon Kim told TechCrunch, leading them to focus on what it viewed as a bigger opportunity in tools for creating creative assets and campaigns.
“We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it,” Kim said.
In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about a new report from Andreessen Horowitz showing that the rare consumers who choose to pay for AI are spending heavily.
The report, based on an analysis of YipitData spending data, found that the top 1% of consumer AI spenders averaged $903 a month in August, an 80% increase over the prior 18 months.
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence’s October 2026 Consumer AI Benchmark Report shows that the share of U.S. consumers who had used generative AI for personal tasks in the past year came to 58.3% in August, compared to 57.6% in June.
But paying for artificial intelligence is far less common, with only 4.5% of consumers in YipitData’s research holding an active personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude in August, more than double the 2.1% from last year.
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