Runway Rolls Out $10 Million Fund Alongside Builders Program for Emerging AI Ventures

Beyond creating AI video models, Runway is now influencing what is constructed on top of them.

According to TechCrunch, the founders of the AI video-generation startup have established a $10 million venture fund to invest in early-stage businesses developing in the fields of AI, media, and world simulation. Additionally, it is launching a Builders program that offers free API credits to seed to Series C firms, indicating that Runway intends to build an ecosystem around what it refers to as “video intelligence.”

Related: Wonderful AI Achieves 80% Containment Rate for Global Call Centers via New $150M Funding Boost

With its tools utilized in marketing, advertising, and film, Runway has emerged as a major force in AI video production. However, the company is now moving beyond creative tooling into wider applications with the release of its “general world models” in December of last year. Additionally, it wants to employ startups to investigate use cases that it is unable to pursue on its own.

Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, chief innovation officer of Runway, told TechCrunch, “We believe 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.”

Three categories comprise Runway’s premise for the fund:

• 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.

According to Matamala-Ortiz, Runway has discreetly supported a few early-stage entrepreneurs and businesses over the last year and a half. These include Tamarind Bio, which employs AI to create novel proteins for drug discovery, and LanceDB, which creates databases for AI applications. Some startups are developing complementary goods, such as Cartesia, a real-time audio production company.

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

Runway is currently valued at about $5.3 billion post-money, having raised almost $860 million from investors like Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority. With intentions to issue checks of up to $500,000 for pre-seed and seed-stage firms, it seeded the $10 million fund with close partners and current investors.

Runway is not the only AI startup that is making the decision to invest in businesses that are just getting started. AI search startup Perplexity established its own $50 million venture fund for seed-stage firms last year, while OpenAI is the pioneer with its Startup Fund. In September, CoreWeave also established CoreWeave Ventures to support AI businesses.

According to Matamala-Ortiz, “many companies like ours are investing heavily on the primitives that will unlock a new set of applications or new types of companies.”

“Businesses like ours, which still employ only 150 people, are unable to concentrate on everything. However, we do see chances for early collaboration with new teams that can profit from our work.

Runway’s new initiative for builders is motivated by the same idea. In order to receive 500,000 API credits and access to Characters, Runway’s freshly launched real-time video agent API powered by its new family of general world models, eligible early-stage firms can begin applying for the program.

Characters provide generative AI entities a face and a voice that may be anything from cartoonish to photorealistic, allowing users to interact with them in real time. One of the goals of the Builders program is to observe what startups create using the technology.

“We are really trying to see which teams see the potential and positive impacts of this technology,” Matamala-Ortiz stated. “Until [recently], we didn’t have the possibilities of talking to a real-time video agent.”

Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject, and Supersonik are among the founding cohort of the program, which is already operational. AI customer care agents, interactive brand characters, customized onboarding experiences, real-time sales assistants, and synthetic media tools are all powered by Characters.

According to Matamala-Ortiz, the prospect of telemedicine and education excites him. Additionally, as Runway’s primary business is entertainment, Matamala-Ortiz stated that he anticipates Characters being utilized in games and other new forms of entertainment.

Matamala-Ortiz stated, “This is a part of our general world models, which is what we’re pushing for next: a set of models that are interactive, real-time, and immersive.” “You can imagine that you will be able to generate and simulate entire environments, as well as participate and have conversations with the characters in these worlds, once you start combining all of these pieces.”

While businesses like StoReel are experimenting with AI-generated shows that customers can interact with directly, other startups like Inworld and Charisma are also creating interactive AI characters for games and narratives. Some, like Character AI, are already well-known for their conversational AI characters.

According to Matamala-Ortiz, “we do really believe that there is a new kind of internet that’s going to be more personalized, more immersive, and in real time.”