How Runware is powering the age of generative AI

The early days of generative AI brought both breakthroughs and bottlenecks. It promised limitless creativity, but in reality, it was painfully slow and prohibitively expensive.

Image generators crashing under demand, prompts taking half a minute to render, compute costs spiraling out of control. Production at scale seemed impossible.

The tools worked, but the infrastructure wasn’t there, says Ioana Hreninciuc, cofounder of genAI development platform Runware.

“The experience of using AI should be like using the internet,” she says. “Extremely responsive, extremely cost-effective … You should be able to scale to millions of users without having to wonder if your GPUs [graphics processing units] are going to bankrupt you at the end of the month.”

Bottleneck to breakthrough

Hreninciuc built her career in cloud and big data engineering, helping design and deploy the first large-scale analytics platforms for clients including Booking.com, Vodafone, and Transport for London.

But she and longtime collaborator and Runware cofounder Flaviu Rădulescu met while working in the mobile gaming sector. Hreninciuc spent years leading data-driven growth and product development at some of the world’s biggest gaming companies, including serving as CEO at GameAnalytics. She was CPO at Huuuge Games when genAI began to accelerate.

In late 2022, Rădulescu built a prototype real-time image generator, called PicFinder, which captured immediate traction, surpassing 100 million images in three months. While other apps had inference times of more than 30 seconds, PicFinder generated high-quality results in less than one second, thanks to its custom AI compute engine.

After the success of PicFinder, Hreninciuc and Rădulescu realized the real opportunity lay not in a single app, but in building the underlying infrastructure — the platform that could make AI generation as fast, accessible, and cost-efficient as the internet itself.

“We had this vision of [combining] all of the AI models under one API,” recalls Hreninciuc. “So, as a company that’s creating AI content or integrating some form of genAI into your product, with one API, you could choose whatever model you wanted, and you could get the best price performance.”

AI-as-a-Service

In 2023, after a year of testing and experimenting, Hreninciuc left her position at Huuuge to turn that vision into a reality, officially launching Runware with Rădulescu. The pair were accepted into a speedrun accelerator, through which they raised $3M in pre-seed funding and built a unified AI infrastructure platform — what Hreninciuc calls an “AI-as-a-Service” layer for developers and companies building generative tools.

Through a single API, Runware lets customers create and manipulate media across hundreds of thousands of models, from image generation and editing to video, and soon, audio and text. In short, Runware makes it possible to build, scale, and update AI-enabled products cost-effectively and fast, says Hreninciuc. “We do all the work to unify and standardize everything and run it on an incredibly high-performance setup, so you don’t have to.”

Scaling with speed and substance

By the time Runware was up and running, genAI adoption was in full swing. McKinsey reports that a third of organizations were using genAI regularly in at least one business function in 2023 — less than a year after most tools debuted. By 2024, that percentage had almost doubled.

By then, Runware had generated some 2.5 billion images for millions of users, through some of the world’s most popular image generation services, including Civitai, Colossyan, and Synthesia.

“The industry is evolving very quickly. If you’re not building on a sustainable advantage long term, at some point you’re just going to be … the same as all the other tools.” 

In September 2025, Runware raised a further $13M in a seed round led by Insight Partners. In between funding rounds, the company grew its monthly revenue 40x and integrated more than 400,000 models into its platform. Runware now serves over 100,000 developers daily and is used by major platforms such as Quora, OpenArt, and Higgsfield AI.

Hreninciuc attributes Runware’s rapid rise to speed and substance. “The most important thing we’ve learned is that time to market is incredibly important, but if you are going to market without a significant advantage, it’s not enough.”

Runware’s advantage comes from its vertically integrated architecture. “We invested heavily in developing a vertical platform,” she says. “We design, own, and operate custom hardware for AI, which is very hard to do initially, especially as a startup — but we’re thankfully very good at it from our years in infrastructure.”

Empowering the builders

Runware solves what Hreninciuc considers one of the least-discussed challenges in the AI industry. “We talk a lot about the models, but not about the pressure it puts on clients to keep up with everything,” she says.

Every few weeks, new models appear, meaning B2B platforms, SaaS companies, and content businesses have to continually update their infrastructure to stay competitive. “Providers like us help to take this pressure away … With one parameter change in our API, you can have the new model supported. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Our vision is unifying all AI under one API that is completely uncompromising for users.”

Runware’s mission extends beyond infrastructure; it’s about creative empowerment.

It has two main types of customers. The first are fast-moving AI-native startups like Higgsfield, which use its platform to build and scale generative products quickly. The second are established software or content companies like Wix, which rely on Runware to integrate AI features without the cost or complexity of managing their own infrastructure.

However, the goal isn’t to flood products with obvious AI output. “That’s really the key — showing that, yes, you can use AI, but it doesn’t have to look like AI. You can make it look really curated and special.”

Autonomy through automation

Hreninciuc sees AI as a catalyst for innovation and greater autonomy for both humans and machines. “What we see with our clients is they’re able to put out new products and scale immensely … [at] a faster rate of growth than [even the early internet].”

The same goes for jobs, she argues. “There is a lot of concern about AI replacing people, but what we’re seeing so far is all these companies are hiring [and] growing … What happens is that the skills required are actually higher. You need more brain power. You need more autonomous individuals. We’ve seen the knowledge demand go up.”

“We see agents as an enabler or accelerator of all the other AI tools — we think that everything that happens now … will end up connected to an agent doing something to facilitate work for a person.”

Runware’s role is to enable that shift, giving teams the tools to go production-grade with AI at unprecedented speed.

The impact can be transformative, says Hreninciuc. “AI generation [brings] new life to products that were, let’s say, plateauing, maybe a little stale … We’ve seen … an immense regeneration of innovation due to AI, and we’re very excited to be powering that.”

*Note: Insight Partners has invested in Runware. This article is part of our ScaleUp:AI 2025 Partner Series, highlighting insights from the companies and leaders shaping the future of AI.