Melius raises $25M for the first ‘agents lab’ for creative work: AI agents take the production busywork
Melius announced $25 million in total funding — a $5M seed led by General Catalyst and a $20M Series A led by CRV — to build what it calls the first ‘agents lab’ for creative work: a shared operating system where teams of AI agents handle the busywork of building images, video, and audio.
Melius, which calls itself the first “agents lab” for creative work, announced $25 million in total funding on Tuesday to build a shared creative operating system where teams of AI agents handle the busywork of creative production. The round combines a $5 million seed led by General Catalyst with a $20 million Series A led by CRV; Genius Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Anti Fund also participated, according to the company-issued announcement. The New York startup says it will use the money to grow its team, build out its go-to-market and sales organization, and keep expanding its agents lab.
Seven-figure run rate, three months out of stealth
Melius came out of stealth in July 2026 with its agents lab. Less than three months later, it says it has crossed a seven-figure run rate, with thousands of teams building their brands’ creative assets on the platform every day. The pitch is simple: a shared creative operating system where teams of AI agents handle the busywork of building images, video, and audio, so creative teams can spend their time imagining.
The founding thesis is that the bottleneck on visual content isn’t model quality — it’s that using today’s models still takes prompt-engineering skill and a patchwork of disconnected tools. “Creative teams don’t have an idea-quantity problem; they have a resource problem,” said co-founder and CEO Joowon Kim. “Generative AI made content cheap to produce, but using it still means prompt-engineering your way through a dozen different tools. We built Melius so teams of AI agents handle everything between an idea and the finished asset, so people can spend their time being creative instead of operating tools.”
Who’s behind it
Melius was co-founded by Joowon Kim (CEO), Young Kim (CTO), and Arnav Ramu (COO). Joowon and Young worked together at Ramp — Joowon as a senior engineer and social media influencer, Young as director of engineering and a co-founder of Venue, which Ramp acquired in 2023. Ramu is a multi-time entrepreneur who previously worked in software investing at Hg and investment banking at Guggenheim.
The investors are buying the team as much as the product. “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,” said Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst. CRV General Partners Veronica Orellana and Reid Christian said the trio is “obsessed with one thing: helping people create exactly what they imagine with AI.”
Why this matters: creative work is the next agent beachhead
Most generative AI tools for creative teams are point solutions — a prompt box here, an editor there. Melius is selling the opposite end of the market: the full workflow from first draft to finished asset, staffed by agents rather than driven by humans. It’s an organizational pitch as much as a technical one, and it’s landing at a moment when creative teams are drowning in tools but still short on hands.
The backing is a signal in itself: General Catalyst and CRV are both buying the idea that the compounding advantage in agents lives in full workflows, not single features. If Melius’s traction numbers — seven-figure run rate, thousands of daily teams, under three months out of stealth — hold, expect every creative-tool category to get its own “agents lab” within a year.
What to watch
First: how Melius prices and packages agent teams. Per-seat, per-asset, or outcome-based pricing will decide whether small studios can actually afford to hand production to agents. Second: conversion of those thousands of teams into paying enterprise accounts — General Catalyst and CRV’s networks should help, but enterprise creative budgets are notoriously sticky. Third: whether the “thousands of teams” keep compounding now that the company is out of stealth and the competition has its number.