Ex-Ramp operator Joowon Kim raises $25M to build an AI creative suite for brands and agencies

Joowon Kim left Ramp in September 2025 to co-found Melius, an AI-powered creative suite targeting brands, agencies, and e-commerce companies. The company has raised a $25M Series A led by General Catalyst with CRV participating — closed in July 2026, roughly ten months after Kim's departure.

The path there wasn't straight. Melius started on a performance marketing idea, pivoted away in March 2026, and landed on its current positioning in April: a creative production platform built around a node-based canvas, agentic timeline editors, a digital asset manager, and MCP integrations with generative media models. Kim says Melius was among the first to publish an MCP that let agents interact with generative media models on a canvas, positioning it early as an infrastructure layer for AI-driven creative work.

“We raised 25,000,000... We landed on building the agents' lab for creative work in April. And then we raised our series A in July... We're primarily catering to a lot of businesses like in fashion, CPG, e-commerce for sure. We also provide services for companies doing even more than $5,000,000,000 in ARR.”

Customer base

Current customers include fashion, CPG, and e-commerce companies. Kim names Doors.com, Chon Media (a New York marketing agency), and Skinny Dipped. He also says Melius serves companies doing more than $5B in ARR, without naming them.

Workflow and distribution

The most telling product detail is how existing customers actually use it. Kim says brands are connecting TikTok's ads library MCP to Claude, setting up morning automations to pull top-trending ads, dumping scripts, transcripts, and key frames into Melius, and reverse-engineering the creative. The same logic applies to Meta's ads library. It's a workflow that's already happening in the market; Melius is positioning itself as the canvas where it lands.

On the question of walled gardens, Kim is explicit: Melius will build plugins for After Effects and Adobe Premiere and support off-platform usage through MCPs and other integrations. The pitch for staying on-platform is the bundled workflow — proactive and reactive agents, the timeline editor, the node-based canvas, and the digital asset manager together — not lock-in.

On taste and AI slop

Kim's view on creative quality is deliberately permissive. He doesn't believe there's such a thing as slop in creative content — if people find it entertaining, that's enough. The business logic follows: Melius won't impose aesthetic filters or workflow constraints. If a user has an idea and wants to make it, the platform should let them.

The longer-term ambition Kim articulates is wide open — "anyone can make anything" — with no near-term commitment to training proprietary models. For now, the bet is on being the orchestration and workflow layer on top of third-party generative models, capturing usage both on and off platform.