Runway Unveils $10 Million Venture Fund and Builders Program To Seed Startups Around Its Video Tech

Runway is putting capital and developer support behind companies that build on its video and simulated-world technology, announcing a $10 million investment vehicle and a startup-focused Builders initiative that hands out API credits and access to its new real-time “Characters” agent. The San Francisco–based firm said it will make investments of up to $500,000 in very early-stage teams and is offering qualifying startups 500,000 API credits to experiment with its agent API, intended to accelerate applications in media, simulation and other sectors.

Company executives describe the fund’s mandate as three-pronged: teams pushing novel model architectures; builders creating applications atop large foundational models; and ventures rethinking how stories and content are produced and distributed. Runway has quietly backed several early projects already, including infrastructure and biotech-focused startups such as LanceDB and Tamarind Bio, and complementary product teams like audio-generation firm Cartesia. The company has raised roughly $860 million to date and is valued at about $5.3 billion, officials said; the new vehicle was seeded by existing investors and strategic partners.

The Builders program is meant to be hands-on. Participating startups will receive credit to run experiments and access to Characters, Runway’s real-time video agent API powered by its family of general world models introduced late last year. Characters gives developers an animated or photoreal conversational avatar with synchronized audio and visuals, and early partners are exploring everything from automated customer-support hosts and branded interactive mascots to personalized onboarding, live sales assistants and synthetic-media production. Runway named Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject and Supersonik among the program’s first cohort.

Runway’s move follows a broader trend of AI platform companies creating funds and developer programs to cultivate ecosystems: OpenAI has a startup program, Perplexity unveiled a $50 million seed fund last year, and infrastructure-backed groups such as CoreWeave have launched venture arms. Industry observers say the strategy helps smaller platforms extend into verticals they cannot staff internally and encourages third-party innovation that can reveal new product directions. “Smaller teams gain scale when partners take on the early experimentation risk,” said an analyst who tracks AI platform businesses. “It’s a way to buy optionality without building every use case yourself.”

That optionality comes with trade-offs. Experts warn that realistic, real-time video agents heighten concerns about misinformation, impersonation and consent, and they say commercial programs need clear safety rules and verifiable provenance. Runway executives acknowledge those risks and say the company will work with partners to establish guardrails while exploring applications in telehealth, education and entertainment, areas where the firm believes immersive, conversational video agents could change user experiences.

Startups interested in the Builders program can apply through Runway’s developer site, the company said. Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, who serves as Runway’s chief innovation officer, emphasized the company’s intent to back early teams that expand what the platform can do and to learn from their product experiments. Note: An earlier draft of this report misstated Matamala-Ortiz’s title and the format of his last name; he is the chief innovation officer and his surname is hyphenated as Matamala-Ortiz.