London-based Runware, a fast-growing AI infrastructure startup, has raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Comcast Ventures, Insight Partners, Speedinvest and a16z Speedrun.
The new funding brings its total capital raised to about $66 million, positioning the company to expand its vision of becoming the unified API for generative image, video and audio applications.
Founded in 2023 by Flaviu Radulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc, Runware focuses on solving one of the most difficult problems in generative AI: reliably running thousands of models at scale, with low latency and predictable costs. The company’s Sonic Inference Engine sits at the center of this effort, combining custom hardware with an optimized orchestration layer that manages model loading, offloading and real-time execution across distributed clouds.
The platform already supports more than 400,000 models, and automatically reroutes workloads when memory or compute limits are hit. This removes the complexity developers typically face when deploying open-source or custom AI models, especially for image, video and audio generation. Instead of dealing with GPUs, cloud limits or incompatible file formats, teams can access everything through one unified API.
Ioana Hreninciuc, Runware’s co-founder and head of operations, explained the company’s technical advantage: “On the software side, we heavily optimize model loading and offloading, which lets us support over 400,000 models and make any of them available for inference in real time.” she told TechCrunch
Hreninciuc said Runware’s pricing and unified API give it a competitive edge in a crowded market. She added the Series A will be used to scale the Sonic Inference Engine and expand engineering capacity so Runware can support many more models and global users.
“We’re also expanding rapidly into new modalities,” Hreninciuc said, noting plans to grow the current team of around 25 engineers. She hopes Runware will “make it possible for applications to scale to millions of users while actually keeping their margins,” adding that broader affordability “benefits everyone. From the app builders to the end users, and puts powerful AI into more people’s hands globally.”
As demand for generative media accelerates across gaming, e-commerce, entertainment and enterprise software, the company’s founders believe the market is entering a phase where speed, reliability and interoperability will matter more than individual models. By offering a single API for every major generative model, Runware hopes to become a foundational layer for the next wave of AI applications.
