Runway goes beyond creating AI video models and shaping what is built on top of them.
The AI video production startup has launched a $10 million venture fund to invest in early-stage companies developing artificial intelligence, media and global simulation, the company’s founders told TechCrunch. It’s also launching a Builders program that offers free API credits for Series C startups, a move that suggests Runway wants to build an ecosystem around what it calls “video intelligence.”
Runway has become one of the leading players in AI video creation, with its tools used in film, advertising and marketing. But with the release of “generic world models” last December, the company is now pushing beyond creative tools into broader applications. And it’s trying to leverage startups as a way to explore use cases it can’t pursue on its own.
“We believe that through video, we will reach video intelligence and it will open up a wider set of use cases in different industries that we can’t duplicate today, but maybe we can support with our research,” Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Runway’s co-founder and chief design officer, told TechCrunch.
Runway’s thesis for the fund is divided into three buckets:
- Technical teams pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and building new kinds of architecture.
- Builders that build the application layer on top of the foundational models and bring AI to new use cases.
- Companies experimenting with new forms of media creation, storytelling and distribution.
Over the past year and a half, Runway has quietly backed a handful of founders and early-stage companies, Ortiz said. These include LanceDBwhich creates databases for artificial intelligence applications and Tamarind Biowhich uses artificial intelligence to design new proteins for drug discovery. Some startups, such as real-time audio production company Cartesiathey work on products that complement its own.
“The next generation of AI models will be based on multimodal data – video, audio, images, text together,” Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, told TechCrunch. “LanceDB is building the level of infrastructure that makes this possible, and Runway is one of the few investors that understands why this matters.”
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Runway has raised nearly $860 million to date from backers including Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority and is valued at around $5.3 billion post-money. It seeded the $10 million fund with existing investors and close partners, with plans to write checks of up to $500,000 to pre-seed and seed-stage startups.
Runway isn’t the only AI startup turning to investing in companies just starting their journeys. OpenAI is the OG with its Startup Fund, and AI search startup Perplexity launched its own $50 million venture fund last year for early-stage startups. Also released CoreWeave CoreWeave Ventures in September to support AI companies.
“A lot of companies like ours are investing heavily in the primitives that will unlock a new set of applications or new types of companies,” Ortiz said. “Companies like ours that are still quite small with only 150 people can’t focus on everything. But we see opportunities to work very early with new groups that can benefit from what we’re doing.”
Building with characters
It’s this same philosophy that drives Runway’s new maker program. Eligible early stage startups can start applying for the program to receive 500,000 API credits and access to CharactersRunway’s recently released real-time video agent API, supported by its new family of generic world models.
Characters allow users to interact with productive 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 creating with technology.
“Until [recently]we haven’t been able to talk to a real-time video agent, so we’re really trying to see which teams see the potential and positive effects of this technology,” Ortiz said.
The program is already live, with a founding team that includes Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject and Supersonik. They use characters to power things like AI customer support agents, interactive brand characters, personalized onboarding experiences, real-time sales assistants, and synthetic media tools.
Ortiz said he is excited about the possibilities of telemedicine and education. And since entertainment is Runway’s bread and butter, Ortiz said he expects the characters to be used in games and new kinds of entertainment experiences.
“That’s part of our general world models that we’re pushing for next: a set of models that are interactive, real-time and immersive,” Ortiz said. “When you start putting all these pieces together, you can imagine being able to create and simulate entire environments and engage and interact with the characters in those worlds.”
Other startups like Inworld and Charisma they also build interactive AI characters for gaming and storytelling, while companies like them StoReel are experimenting with AI-generated shows that users can interact with directly. Some, like Character AI, are already popular for their AI characters you can talk to.
“We really believe there’s a new kind of Internet that’s going to be more personalized, more immersive and real-time,” Ortiz said.
