Runware, a startup founded by two Romanian entrepreneurs, announced last week that it had secured $50 million in Series A funding led by Dawn Capital, one of Europe’s largest investors in B2B software companies. The round also included Comcast Ventures, Speedinvest, Insight Partners and a16z Speedrun.
The company founded by Flaviu Rădulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc in 2023 has raised a total of $66 million to date. It also serves more than 300 million users and generates 10 billion images, videos and audio files for 200,000 developers, according to Ziarul Financial.
Rădulescu, currently based in London, began his entrepreneurial journey in the late 1990s, when he founded eLibris, one of Romania’s first online stores, later bought by RTC Holding and transformed into Dol.ro, as well as the advertising network AdSpace, which was also sold. He then co-founded Bigstep, a cloud computing platform, and Lumminary, a startup in the field of DNA data processing.
San Francisco-based Ioana Hreninciuc served as CEO of GameAnalytics between 2018 and 2021 and as Chief Product Officer at Homa Games and Huuuge Games.
The two have known each other for almost 15 years: they worked together at Hostway, a global hosting provider, then at Bigstep and, again, at GameAnalytics. Both graduated from the a16z Speedrun program in 2023.
Runware was founded in 2023 after Rădulescu realized that generative artificial intelligence technology, while powerful, was slow. The platform provides developers with the ability to integrate image, video, and audio generation into their applications through a single API, without building their own infrastructure or maintaining separate integrations for each AI model.
“We built our own Sonic inference engine, our own GPU infrastructure, our own inference PODs, and our own optimizations, pushing the boundaries of what large-scale AI providers can do,” Rădulescu wrote on LinkedIn.
The company claims to offer “zero-day” access to the models, meaning they can run on Runware immediately after release. Runware’s clients include Freepik, Wix, Together AI, Higgsfield AI, ImagineArt and NightCafe Studio.
“Our API enables the generation of images, video and audio for over 300 million end users,” said Hreninciuc, co-founder and head of operations and go-to-market.
Competition in the AI inference platform market for developers is fierce, and Runware’s competitors are valued in the billions. The founders, however, claim that their platform has managed to grow with a seed budget more than ten times lower than that of its competitors, because it uses a cost per generated image model.
Money from the new round will be used to develop infrastructure. The company plans to install more than 20 “Inference PODs” in major cities in Europe and the United States in 2026, bringing latency below 10 milliseconds. The long-term goal is to become “a single API for all artificial intelligence,” capable of running more than 2 million models.
The team, currently made up of around 25 people, is also set to grow.
(Photo source: runware.ai)