Runway, the AI video generation company behind some of the most advanced generative video tools on the market, is expanding its ambitions well beyond content creation. The startup has announced a $10 million venture fund and a new Builders program aimed at supporting early-stage companies working across AI, media, and world simulation.
It's a strategic bet that signals Runway's desire to become more than a product company — it wants to be a platform, and eventually, an ecosystem.
From Video Generation to Video Intelligence
Runway has built its reputation on cutting-edge AI video tools used widely in film, advertising, and marketing. But since the release of its "general world models" in December 2025, the company has been steadily pushing into broader territory — what it calls "video intelligence."
The idea is that video isn't just a creative output. It's a medium through which AI can understand and simulate the physical world. And if that thesis holds, the applications stretch far beyond Hollywood.
"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," said Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Runway's co-founder and chief design officer. "We can't double down on all of them today, but maybe we can support them with our research."
The Fund: $10 Million, Three Theses
The fund, seeded with capital from Runway's existing investors and close partners, will write checks of up to $500,000 for pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Investments will focus on three core areas: teams pushing the boundaries of AI architecture, builders creating new applications on top of foundation models, and companies experimenting with novel forms of media creation and distribution.
Runway has already been making quiet investments for the past year and a half. Its portfolio includes LanceDB, a database company for AI applications, and Tamarind Bio, which uses AI for protein design in drug discovery. Real-time audio generation company Cartesia — whose work complements Runway's own — is also in the mix.
The move puts Runway in a growing club of AI companies that are turning around to invest in the next generation. OpenAI has its Startup Fund, Perplexity launched a $50 million venture fund in early 2025, and CoreWeave stood up its own ventures arm last September.
For a 150-person company valued at roughly $5.3 billion, the logic is straightforward: Runway can't explore every use case itself, but it can back founders who will.
The Builders Program: Credits, Characters, and a Founding Cohort
Alongside the fund, Runway is launching a Builders program that offers seed to Series C startups free API credits and access to Characters — the company's recently released real-time video agent API.
Characters lets developers build generative AI agents with faces and voices that can interact with users in real time, ranging from cartoonish to photorealistic. It's powered by Runway's new family of general world models, and it represents one of the company's most ambitious product bets yet.
The Builders program is designed to see what founders do with the technology. The founding cohort already includes Cartesia, MSCHF, Oasys Health, Spara, Subject, and Supersonik. These companies are using Characters to build everything from AI-powered customer support agents and interactive brand characters to personalized onboarding flows and synthetic media tools.
Ortiz said he's particularly excited about the potential in telemedicine and education, and naturally expects strong uptake in gaming and entertainment — Runway's home turf.
A Bigger Vision
There's a common thread running through Runway's fund and its Builders program: the belief that AI is heading toward fully interactive, immersive, real-time environments.
"When 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," Ortiz said.
It's a bold vision, and Runway isn't alone in chasing it. Companies like Inworld and Charisma are building interactive AI characters for games and storytelling, while startups like StoReel are experimenting with AI-generated shows that users can directly engage with.
But by funding and equipping the next wave of builders, Runway is positioning itself not just as a tool in the creative stack, but as a foundational layer for what it believes will be a fundamentally new kind of internet — one that's more personalized, more immersive, and built in real time.
