Funding round led by Dawn Capital with participation from Comcast Ventures, DST, Speedinvest, Insight Partners, and a16z Speedrun
Runware, a provider of high-performance AI inference infrastructure, announced the successful close of a $50 million Series A funding round. The financing was led by Dawn Capital and included participation from Comcast Ventures, DST, Speedinvest, Insight Partners, and a16z Speedrun, supporting the company’s mission to deliver one unified API for all AI models and accelerate intelligent application development worldwide.
Founded in 2023, Runware has quickly emerged as a key infrastructure partner for developers and enterprises building AI-driven products. Over the past two years, the company’s platform has powered more than 10 billion AI generations for 200,000+ developers and reached over 300 million end-users across image, video, and audio use cases all through a single unified API backed by Runware’s custom hardware and Sonic Inference Engine®.
Runware’s platform addresses common challenges in deploying AI at scale, such as fragmented access to models, unpredictable costs, and slow inference performance that can degrade user experience. By combining proprietary AI inference hardware with an optimized software stack, the company delivers up to 10x lower pricing and faster performance than traditional data center-based solutions.
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The unified API aggregates nearly 300 AI model classes and hundreds of thousands of model variants behind a consistent interface, enabling development teams to easily integrate, A/B test, route, and swap models with minimal code changes. Runware reports significant performance improvements 30–40% faster inference for open source models compared with other platforms and 10x cost-performance gains for open source deployments, plus 10–40% savings on closed source foundational models.
Runware’s customer roster includes leading platforms such as Wix, Together.ai, ImagineArt, Quora, OpenArt, Freepik, and Higgsfield AI, among others, who rely on the company’s platform to deliver media generation experiences at scale.
Looking ahead, Runware plans to expand its platform and extend the Sonic Inference Engine to support every AI model through a single API, including deploying all 2 million+ new models from Hugging Face by the end of 2026. To support global demand and performance needs, the company is also rolling out custom inference PODs, which can be rapidly deployed wherever power is available and affordable, avoiding lengthy traditional data center buildouts.
Quotes
“We are building infrastructure that can run AI faster, more cost-effectively, and with higher redundancy.” – Flaviu Radulescu, Co-Founder & CEO, Runware
“The goal is to give teams a single API that lets them roll out any AI model in minutes without juggling providers or committing to huge minimums. When developers can focus on product, they unlock new features and growth peaks for their users.” – Ioana Hreninciuc, Co-Founder & COO, Runware
From the investor perspective, Dawn Capital emphasized the strategic relevance of Runware’s approach: “Runware sits at the right layer of the stack, built by a team who understands both the hardware and software required to bend the cost curve for customers.”
Source: Runware