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

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

The AI ​​video generation startup has launched a $10 million venture fund to invest in early-stage companies focused on AI, media and world simulation, the company’s founders told TechCrunch. It’s also introducing a Builders program that offers free API credits to Series C startups, 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 generation, with its tools used in film, advertising and marketing. But with the launch of its ‘general world models’ last December, the company is now moving beyond creative tools and into broader applications. And it wants to engage startups as a way to explore use cases it can’t pursue alone.

“We think we’ll achieve video intelligence through video, and it will open up a broader set of use cases across industries that we can’t address today, but that we may be able to support with our research,” Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, co-founder and chief design officer of Runway, told TechCrunch.

Runway’s position for the fund is divided into three buckets:

1. Engineering teams pushing the boundaries of AI and building new types of architecture.
2. Builders who create the application layer on top of basic models and bring AI to new use cases.
3. Companies that experiment with new forms of media creation, storytelling and distribution.

Over the past year and a half, Runway has quietly backed a handful of early-stage founders and companies, Ortiz said. Those include LanceDBthat builds databases for AI applications, and Tamarind Organicthat uses AI to design new proteins for drug discovery. Some startups, such as a real-time audio generation company Cartesiaworking on products that complement our own products.

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

Runway has raised nearly $860 million to date from backers like Nvidia and Qatar Investment Authority, and is valued post-money at around $5.3 billion. It invested the $10 million fund with 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 turning to invest in companies just starting their journey. OpenAI is the OG with its Startup Fund, and AI search startup Perplexity last year launched its own $50 million venture capital fund for early-stage startups. CoreWeave has also been launched CoreWeave Ventures in September to support AI companies.

“Many companies like ours are investing heavily in the primitives that will unlock a new set of applications or new types of businesses,” Ortiz said. “Companies like ours, which are still quite small with only 150 people, can’t focus on everything. But we do see opportunities to collaborate very early on with new teams that can benefit from what we do.”

Building with characters

That same philosophy is the driving force behind Runway’s new program for builders. Eligible early-stage startups can launch apply for the program to get 500,000 API credits and access CharactersRunway’s recently released real-time video agent API powered by its new family of global world models.

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

“To [recently]We didn’t have the ability to talk to a real-time video agent, so we’re really trying to see which teams see the potential and positive impact of this technology,” said Ortiz.

The program is already live, with a cohort consisting of Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject and Supersonik. They use Characters to power things like AI customer support agents, interactive brand personas, personalized onboarding experiences, real-time sales assistants, and synthetic media tools.

Ortiz said he is excited about the possibilities for telemedicine and education. And since entertainment is Runway’s bread and butter, Ortiz said he expects characters to be used in gaming and new types of entertainment experiences.

“This is part of our overall world models, and that’s what we’re aiming for now: a set of models that are interactive, real-time and immersive,” Ortiz said. “If you start putting all these pieces together, you can imagine being able to generate and simulate entire environments, and participate and have conversations with the characters in these worlds.”

Other startups like Inworld and Charisma are also building interactive AI characters for gaming and storytelling, as companies like that StoReel experimenting with AI-generated programs that allow users to interact directly. Some, like Character AI, are already popular for their AI characters you can talk to.

“We really believe there is a new kind of internet that will be more personal, more immersive and in real time,” Ortiz said.