Ex-Ramp Engineers Raise $20M for Melius After Pivoting to AI Ad Creative Platform

TL;DR

• Former Ramp engineers scrapped their original ad spend optimization tool after finding creative production, not budget allocation, was the real bottleneck for growth teams.
• Melius has raised $20M in fresh funding to build an AI platform that generates ad creative assets and launches full campaigns across Meta, TikTok, and Google.
• The round signals a broader shift in martech from analytics dashboards to generative engines that produce and test creative at scale.

Scrapping V1 to Find Product-Market Fit

Melius didn't start as a creative company. The founding team, made up of ex-Ramp engineers, initially set out to build an ad spend optimization product — a smarter layer for allocating budgets, killing underperformers, and shifting dollars to winning channels.

It worked in demos, but flopped in the real world. According to the founders, customers liked the optimization logic but kept hitting the same wall: they didn't have enough fresh creative to feed the machine. Media buying had become automated, but ad production was still slow, expensive, and manual.

So earlier this year, the team made the hard call to scrap V1 entirely. Instead of optimizing how dollars were spent, they decided to fix what those dollars were spent on.

Why Creative Became the Bottleneck

The pivot reflects a painful truth in performance marketing in 2026. With targeting largely automated by Meta's Advantage+, TikTok's Smart+, and Google's Performance Max, the biggest lever left for advertisers is creative diversity.

Brands now need hundreds of variations — UGC-style videos, hooks, product demos, statics, copy variants — tested weekly. Traditional agencies and in-house studios can't keep up, and costs balloon quickly.

Melius is betting that generative AI has finally crossed the threshold where it can produce on-brand, performance-ready assets, not just generic stock-like content. The platform ingests a brand's product catalog, website, past winners, and brand guidelines, then generates new concepts built for direct response.

Inside the Melius Platform

Unlike point tools for AI images or AI avatars, Melius is positioning itself as an end-to-end campaign system.

Users input a product URL or value prop, and the system generates full creative packages: scripts, AI-generated UGC videos, product shots, headlines, and primary text. It then assembles them into ready-to-launch campaigns, pushes them live to Meta, TikTok, and Google, and uses early performance signals to iterate on the next batch of creative.

The company says early customers are launching 10x more variants while cutting production costs by over 70%, with particular traction among DTC, fintech, and mobile app advertisers spending $50k to $1M per month.

Who Is Backing the $20M Bet

Melius has raised $20M in fresh funding to scale that vision, bringing its total raised to date to just over that mark.

The round was led by a top-tier Silicon Valley venture firm, with participation from existing early backers and angels from the Ramp, Stripe, and Meta ecosystem. Ramp executives are also backing the company, underscoring the founders' ties to the spend-management unicorn where they previously built infrastructure for finance teams.

The capital will be used to expand the engineering and AI research team in New York and San Francisco, deepen integrations with ad platforms, and build out its creative performance analytics loop.

What It Signals for the Future of Martech

Melius's pivot and fundraise is part of a much larger reshuffling in marketing tech.

First, the value is moving up the stack. For a decade, startups sold better dashboards, attribution, and budget automation. Now, with AI media buying commoditized, investors are pouring money into startups that actually make the ads.

Second, it validates the founder-market fit story coming out of Ramp. Known for rigorous engineering and operational efficiency, Ramp alumni are increasingly launching AI startups focused on automating expensive back-office and agency workflows.

If Melius succeeds, the implication is stark for agencies and creative studios: the future of growth marketing won't be about managing spreadsheets, but directing fleets of AI agents that ideate, produce, launch, and learn in one continuous loop.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.