Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for Melius, pivot to AI creative tools

Former engineers from fintech startup Ramp have raised $20 million for Melius, a new AI platform that shifted away from its original focus on marketing spend management. The founders decided to scrap their initial product direction and instead build AI tools designed to help generate marketing campaigns and creative assets.

The pivot reflects a common pattern among AI startups: founders recognizing that AI models and generative tools are better suited to content creation than to optimization tasks that may require domain-specific knowledge or real-time execution.