GoKawiilRunway is moving beyond building AI video models and into shaping what gets built on top of them.
The AI video-generation startup has launched a $10 million venture fund to invest in early-stage companies building across AI, media, and world simulation, the company’s founders told TechCrunch. It’s also rolling out a Builders program offering seed to Series C 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 generation, with its tools used across film, advertising, and marketing. But with the launch of its “general world models” last December, the company is now pushing beyond creative tooling into broader applications. And it’s looking to tap startups as a way to explore use cases it can’t pursue alone.
“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,” Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, Runway’s co-founder and chief innovation officer, told TechCrunch.
Runway’s thesis for the fund is divided into three 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.
For the past year and a half, Runway has quietly backed a handful of early-stage founders and companies, Matamala-Ortiz said. Those include LanceDB, which builds databases for AI applications, and Tamarind Bio, which uses AI to design new proteins for drug discovery. Some startups, like real-time audio-generation firm Cartesia, are working on products that complement its own.
“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 possible, and Runway is one of the few investors who understands why that matters.”
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