{"id":557851,"date":"2026-04-01T08:23:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T08:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/557851\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T08:23:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T08:23:17","slug":"exclusive-runway-launches-10m-fund-builders-program-to-support-early-stage-ai-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/557851\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Runway launches $10M fund, Builders program to support early-stage AI startups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Runway<\/a> is moving beyond building AI video models<\/a> and into shaping what gets built on top of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s founders told TechCrunch. It\u2019s 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 \u201cvideo intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgeneral world models\u201d<\/a> last December, the company is now pushing beyond creative tooling into broader applications. And it\u2019s looking to tap startups as a way to explore use cases it can\u2019t pursue alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think that through video, we\u2019re going to get to video intelligence, and it\u2019s going to open a wider set of use cases in different industries that we can\u2019t double down on today, but that maybe we can support with our research,\u201d Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, Runway\u2019s co-founder and chief innovation officer, told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

Runway\u2019s thesis for the fund is divided into three buckets: <\/p>\n

Technical teams that are pushing the frontier of AI and building new kinds of architecture. <\/p>\n

Builders creating the application layer on top of foundation models and bringing AI to new use cases.<\/p>\n

Companies experimenting with new forms of media creation, storytelling, and distribution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, which builds databases for AI applications, and Tamarind Bio<\/a>, which uses AI to design new proteins for drug discovery. Some startups, like real-time audio-generation firm Cartesia<\/a>, are working on products that complement its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next generation of AI models will be built on multimodal data \u2013 video, audio, images, text together,\u201d Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, told TechCrunch in a statement. \u201cLanceDB is building the infrastructure layer that makes that possible, and Runway is one of the few investors who understands why that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Runway has raised close to $860 million to date from backers like Nvidia and Qatar Investment Authority, and is valued at around $5.3 billion post-money<\/a>. It seeded 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Runway isn\u2019t the only AI startup that\u2019s turning around to invest in companies just starting out on their journeys. OpenAI is the OG with its Startup Fund, and AI search startup Perplexity launched its own $50 million venture fund<\/a> last year for seed-stage startups. CoreWeave also launched CoreWeave Ventures<\/a> in September to back AI companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany companies like ours are investing heavily on the primitives that will unlock a new set of applications or new types of companies,\u201d Matamala-Ortiz said. \u201cCompanies like ours that are still fairly small with only 150 people can\u2019t focus on everything. But we do see opportunities in partnering very early with new teams that can benefit from what we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building with Characters<\/p>\n

\"\"A sample Character made by RunwayImage Credits:Runway AI<\/p>\n

That same philosophy is what is driving Runway\u2019s new program for builders. Eligible early-stage startups can start applying<\/a> for the program to get 500,000 API credits and access to Characters<\/a>, Runway\u2019s recently released real-time video agent API that\u2019s powered by its new family of general world models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Characters lets users interact with generative AI agents in real time, giving them a face and a voice that can range from cartoonish to photorealistic. The Builders program is designed, in part, to see what startups build with the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil [recently], we didn\u2019t have the possibilities of talking to a real-time video agent, so we are really trying to see which teams see the potential and positive impacts of this technology,\u201d Matamala-Ortiz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The program is already live, with a founding cohort that includes Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject, and Supersonik. They\u2019re using Characters to power things like AI customer support agents, interactive brand characters, personalized onboarding experiences, real-time sales assistants, and synthetic media tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matamala-Ortiz said he\u2019s excited about the potential for telemedicine and education. And since entertainment is Runway\u2019s bread and butter, Matamala-Ortiz said he expects Characters to be used in gaming and new kinds of entertainment experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is part of our general world models, which is what we\u2019re pushing for next: a set of models that are interactive, real-time, and immersive,\u201d Matamala-Ortiz said. \u201cWhen you start combining all of these pieces, you can imagine that you will be able to generate and simulate entire environments, and participate and have conversations with the characters in these worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other startups like Inworld<\/a> and Charisma<\/a> are also building interactive AI characters for games and storytelling, while companies like StoReel<\/a> are experimenting with AI-generated shows users can engage with directly. Some, like Character AI<\/a>, are already popular for their AI characters you can talk to.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do really believe that there\u2019s a new kind of internet that\u2019s going to be more personalized, more immersive, and in real time,\u201d Matamala-Ortiz said.<\/p>\n

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the title and surname of Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz. He is the chief innovation officer, not the chief design officer. Additionally, his last name is hyphenated; he should be referred to as Matamala-Ortiz, not Ortiz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Runway is moving beyond building AI video models and into shaping what gets built on top of them.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,247536,181,507,186,1873,54318,74,151261],"class_list":{"0":"post-557851","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-video-generation","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-exclusive","13":"tag-generative-ai","14":"tag-runway","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-world-models"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}