San Francisco, California - Sep 09, 2025 (UTC) - Runware, a performance & price-focused AI-as-a-Service provider, today announced a $13M fundraise led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from previous investors a16z Speedrun, Begin Capital, and Zero Prime. The funding will be used to expand Runware’s capabilities from image and video generation to all-media workflows, including audio, LLM, and 3D. To date, more than 4 billion visual assets have been generated on Runware’s inference engine and over 100,000 developers have been onboarded in less than a year since launch. The platform hosts more than 400,000 AI models and powers media inference for more than 250 million end users through customers like Quora, NightCafe, OpenArt, and FocalML.
Runware runs its AI media generation API on the proprietary Sonic Inference Engine®, which integrates custom-designed hardware and bespoke software to achieve greater cost efficiency and generation speed. As compute intensive workloads like video generation gain popularity and GPU costs burn through budgets, consumer AI apps are increasingly looking to cut costs. Specialized solutions like Runware deliver all-media generation and provide up to 10x cost savings on implementation & inference.
“As more and more models launch, devs can have tens or even hundreds of endpoints to integrate with and maintain. We see model providers now moving to our platform and offering their APIs from our inference pod, because we can deliver up to 90% lower inference cost than any cloud provider,” said Flaviu Radulescu, Founder at Runware.
Following its recent round, Runware is investing heavily in extending its inference engine and API to all AI media workloads. The company already integrates all image and video models from Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, Ideogram, ByteDance, Kling, Minimax Hailuo, Google Veo, PixVerse, Vidu, Alibaba Wan & Qwen, and is actively expanding into audio and LLM models. Its model hub currently hosts more than 400,000 AI generation models.
“Runware is a hidden gem every serious AI application should consider. It offers incredibly competitive pricing across top models, consistently strong performance, and responsive, helpful customer support. If you’re building with AI, Runware should be on your radar,” said Coco Mao, CEO at OpenArt.
“The core of Runware’s advantage is its purpose-built Sonic Inference Engine®. While others often rely on commodity cloud infrastructure, Runware built its own workload-specific infrastructure — giving it control over latency, throughput, and cost at a fundamental level. That technical edge can be transformational and is what makes Runware a performance leader in AI media generation,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners. Mathew joins Runware’s board as part of the fundraise.
Runware’s ability to make fundamental hardware optimizations is based on Flaviu Radulescu’s previous 20 years of experience building bare metal data clusters for clients like Vodafone, Booking.com, and Transport for London. Runware designs and builds its own custom GPU and networking hardware, packaged in a proprietary inference pod optimized for rapid deployment and use of cost-effective renewable energy.
“We chose Runware as our primary inference partner for their price and the flexibility of the API. NightCafe users are avid explorers of AI – they want to try all the models, hyperparameters, LoRAs and other options. On other providers there are often different endpoints for all these things, but not a single endpoint that combines them all. On Runware it’s a single endpoint that we send all the user’s options to. It also happens to be less than half – sometimes less than 1/5 – of the cost of other providers,” said Angus Russell, Founder at NightCafe.
“We moved to Runware on a day where we had a big traffic surge. Their API was easy to integrate and handled the sudden load very smoothly. Their combination of quality, speed, and price was by far the best in the market, and they’ve been excellent partners as we’ve scaled up,” said Robert Cunningham, Co-Founder at Focal.
About Runware
Runware delivers AI-as-a-Service at 90% lower cost and with higher speed than competitors. Built for scale, the service has already powered 4 billion+ creations for +100K developers and +250M end-users worldwide. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Runware is backed by Insight Partners and a16z Speedrun. The company’s proprietary Sonic Inference Engine® integrates custom-designed hardware and software to provide cost-efficient AI media generation across images, video, audio, LLM, and 3D workflows.
