Runway launches $10M venture fund and startup program

Runway is expanding beyond its core artificial intelligence video generation tools by launching a $10 million venture fund and a Builders program to support early-stage startups. The initiative aims to cultivate an ecosystem around what the company terms “video intelligence”—Runway’s proprietary concept for the next phase of video-based AI. By backing external startups, the company is looking to explore use cases it cannot pursue alone. This strategy builds on the launch of its “general world models” last December, which is Runway’s proprietary term for its family of interactive, real-time, and immersive models.

The new fund’s investment thesis is divided into three distinct buckets:

• Technical teams that are pushing the frontier of AI and building new kinds of architecture.
• Builders creating the application layer on top of foundation models and bringing AI to new use cases.
• Companies experimenting with new forms of media creation, storytelling, and distribution.

Runway has already backed several early-stage companies, including database infrastructure provider LanceDB, drug discovery startup Tamarind Bio, and real-time audio-generation firm Cartesia. “We think that through video, we’re going to get to video intelligence, and it’s going to open a wider set of use cases in different industries that we can’t double down on today, but that maybe we can support with our research,” said Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, Runway’s co-founder and chief innovation officer.

Runway, which has raised close to $860 million to date from investors including Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority, is valued at around $5.3 billion post-money. With only 150 employees, the company plans to write checks of up to $500,000 for pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Runway joins a growing list of AI companies using venture capital to seed their own ecosystems. Competitor OpenAI operates its own startup fund, while Perplexity launched a venture fund last year, and CoreWeave established CoreWeave Ventures in September.

Alongside the fund, Runway is rolling out its Builders program, which offers seed to Series C startups 500,000 API credits—which provide free access to Runway’s software tools—and access to Characters, its real-time video agent API. The program’s founding cohort includes Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject, and Supersonik. Runway hopes the program will help startups build interactive, real-time, and immersive applications, as the company pushes toward a more personalized and real-time internet.

Why it matters

Runway is shifting from a pure model builder to an ecosystem architect, using capital and API access to seed the “video intelligence” applications it cannot build in-house.