They burned their first startup's entire codebase. The pivot just raised $20M.
Melius, built by three ex-Ramp engineers after their first product "didn't have legs," crossed $1M in annualized revenue two months after launch -- in a market where the category leader already does $700M.
Melius, a New York startup founded by three former Ramp engineers, raised a $20 million Series A led by CRV on top of an earlier $5 million seed led by General Catalyst, TechCrunch reported October 6 -- $25 million total for a company whose current product has existed for about three months. Founders Joowon Kim, Young Kim, and Arnav Ramu describe an unusually blunt pivot to get there: their first product, an AI-powered performance-marketing tool, spent six months in market before the team concluded it "didn't have legs." Their response wasn't to adjust it. "We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," Joowon Kim told TechCrunch.
What they built instead
Melius now pitches itself as an "agents lab for creative work" -- a system that generates ad campaigns, images, and video for marketing teams, launched publicly in July 2026 and already past $1 million in annualized revenue two months in. That's a fast ramp for a pivot this recent, and it's happening in a category that already has a dominant, much larger player: Higgsfield, valued at $5.4 billion as of August 2026, reportedly runs north of $700 million in annualized revenue. Krea and Flora AI round out the competitive set TechCrunch names.
The real signal is the willingness to delete it
Scrapping a working product after six months, rather than iterating on it indefinitely because investors already funded it, is the part of this story worth more attention than the funding number. A team that burns its own codebase on a six-month timeline when the market isn't responding is making a specific, falsifiable claim about its own judgment -- and the $20M Series A is effectively the market pricing that judgment, not just the new product. For a category already anchored by a $700M-ARR incumbent, whether Melius's speed into eight figures of revenue reflects genuine product-market fit or just early-mover froth in a hot niche is exactly the kind of claim this site exists to keep checking against actual retention and revenue numbers, not just a funding headline.