Romanian-founded AI startup Runware attracts USD 50 mln Series A funding
Runware, a startup founded by two Romanian entrepreneurs, announced last week that it has secured a USD 50 million Series A funding round led by Dawn Capital, one of the largest European 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 USD 66 million to date. It has also come to serve over 300 million users and to generate 10 billion images, videos, and audio files for 200,000 developers, according to Ziarul Financiar.
Rădulescu, currently based in London, began his entrepreneurial journey in the late 1990s, when he founded eLibris, one of the first online stores in Romania, later acquired by RTC Holding and transformed into Dol.ro, and the advertising network AdSpace, which was also sold. He later co-founded Bigstep, a cloud computing platform, and Lumminary, a startup in the field of DNA data processing.
Ioana Hreninciuc, based in San Francisco, was CEO of GameAnalytics between 2018 and 2021 and Chief Product Officer at Homa Games and Huuuge Games.
The two have known each other for nearly 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, although powerful, was slow. The platform offers developers 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 limits of what large-scale AI providers can do,” Rădulescu wrote on LinkedIn.
The company claims to offer “day-zero” access to models, meaning they can run on Runware immediately upon release. Among Runware’s clients are Freepik, Wix, Together AI, Higgsfield AI, ImagineArt, and NightCafe Studio.
“Our API powers image, video, and audio generation for over 300 million end users,” specified Hreninciuc, co-founder and head of operations and go-to-market.
Competition in the market for AI inference platforms for developers is fierce, and Runware’s rivals are valued at billions. The founders say, however, that their platform managed to grow with a seed-type budget more than ten times smaller than that of competitors because it uses a cost-per-generated-image model.
The money from the new round will be used to expand infrastructure. The company plans to install over 20 “Inference PODs” in major cities across Europe and the US in 2026, bringing latency below 10 milliseconds. The long-term goal is to become “a single API for all artificial intelligence,” capable of running over 2 million models.
The team, currently consisting of approximately 25 people, is also set to expand.
(Photo source: runware.ai)
