Exclusive: Runway launches $10M fund, developer program to support early-stage AI startups

Runway goes beyond building AI video models and shapes what is built on top of them.

An AI video production startup has launched a $10 million investment fund to invest in startups building across AI, media, and global simulation, the company’s founders told TechCrunch. It also launched a Builders program that offers seed to a series of startups free API credits, a move that suggests Runway wants to create an ecosystem around what it calls “video intelligence.”

Runway has become one of the leading players in AI video production, with its tools used across film, advertising, and marketing. But with the launch of its “global models” last December, the company is now moving beyond creative tools into broader systems. It also looks at tapping startups as a way to test use cases it can’t follow on its own.

“We think that with video, we will reach video intelligence, and it will open a wide set of use cases in different industries that we cannot duplicate today, but that maybe we can support with our research,” Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Runway’s founder and chief design officer, told TechCrunch.

Thesis Runway fund is divided into three buckets:

1. Tech teams are pushing the boundaries of AI and creating new types of architecture.
2. Architects create an application layer on top of base models and bring AI to new use cases.
3. Companies experimenting with new ways to create media, tell stories, and distribute.

Over the past year and a half, Runway has quietly supported a number of founders and startups, Ortiz said. Those include LanceDB, which is building a database of AI applications, and Tamarind Bio, which uses AI to design new proteins for drug discovery. Other startups, such as real-time audio production firm Cartesia, are working on products that complement his.

“The next generation of AI models will be built on multimodal data — video, audio, images, text together,” Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, told TechCrunch in a statement. “LanceDB is building the infrastructure layer that makes that happen, and Runway is one of the few investors that understands why that’s important.”

Runway has raised about $860 million so far from backers such as Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority, and is valued at $5.3 billion after cash. It has raised a $10 million fund from existing investors and close partners, with plans to write checks of up to $500,000 for pre-seed and seed stage startups.

Runway isn’t the only AI startup investing in startups. OpenAI is OG with its own Startup Fund, and AI search startup Perplexity launched its own $50 million fund last year for seed-stage startups. CoreWeave also launched CoreWeave Ventures in September to support AI companies.

“A lot of companies like ours invest heavily in startups that will open up a new set of applications or new types of companies,” Ortiz said. Companies like ours are young as they only have 150 people they can’t focus on everything.

Building with Letters

That same philosophy is what drives the new Builders Runway program. Eligible early-stage startups can begin applying to the program to receive 500,000 API credits and access to characters, Runway’s newly released API for a real-time video agent powered by its new family of global models.

Characters allow users to interact with AI-generated agents in real-time, giving them a face and voice that can range from animation to photography. The Builders program is designed, in part, to see what startups are building with technology.

“Until then [recently]”We haven’t had the opportunity to talk to a real-time video agent, so we’re really trying to see which groups see the potential and positive impacts of this technology,” Ortiz said.

The program is already live, with a founding team that includes Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasis Health, Spara, Title, and Supersonik. They use Characters to power things like AI customer support agents, interactive brand characters, personalized onboarding experiences, real-time sales assistants, and artificial media tools.

Ortiz said he is excited about the telemedicine and education opportunity. And since entertainment is Runway’s bread and butter, Ortiz said he expects Characters to be used in games and new forms of entertainment.

“This is part of our global models, which is what we’re striving for next: a set of interactive, real-time, and immersive models,” Ortiz said. “When you start putting all these pieces together, you can imagine being able to generate and simulate a universe, and participate and have conversations with the characters in these worlds.”

Other startups like Inworld and Charisma are also creating interactive AI characters for games and storytelling, while companies like StoReel are experimenting with AI-generated shows that users can directly interact with. Others, like Character AI, are already famous for their AI characters that you can talk to.

“We truly believe that there is a new type of Internet that will be personalized, more focused, and in real time,” Ortiz said.