Today we're introducing Runway Fund, an investment vehicle dedicated to backing the next generation of companies building across AI, media and world simulation.
We've been investing quietly out of this fund for several years already, backing a range of companies, including Cartesia, LanceDB and Tamarind Bio. And today, we're excited to formalize that work as part of our commitment to early-stage startups.
We're committing up to $10M to start, with the potential to grow our Fund as we expand our focus here. While check sizes will vary, we'll generally look to invest up to $500K in pre-seed or seed stage companies. And while we're interested in speaking to founders building any type of interesting technology, our focus will be on three thesis areas:
- AI Research: Technical teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible with world models and generative AI.
- New Applications: Builders creating the application layer on top of foundation models, bringing AI to new use cases.
- New Media & Content: Creatives inventing new kinds of storytelling, entertainment and experiences that didn't exist before.
"The next generation of AI models will be built on multimodal data – video, audio, images, text together. LanceDB is building the infrastructure layer that makes that possible, and Runway is one of the few investors who understands why that matters," said Chang She, CEO & Co-founder, LanceDB.
"We started Runway because we believed new tools could unlock entirely new kinds of applications and industries. Runway Fund is about finding the people and early teams who share that belief and giving them every advantage we can," said Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Runway.
If you're building something that feels aligned, we want to hear from you at fund@runwayml.com.
