Runway Raises $2M Seed for Mobile App Release Management

Runway Launches from Beta with $2 Million in Seed Funding

Emerging from the challenges experienced by Rent the Runway’s initial iOS development team, Runway is now officially exiting its beta phase. The company’s service is designed to streamline the mobile application release process, functioning as what the team terms an “air traffic control” system for mobile deployments.

A $2 million seed funding round, spearheaded by Bedrock Capital, has been secured to further the product’s development and expansion.

Investor Details

Additional investors participating in this round include Array Ventures, Chapter One, Breakpoint Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Four Cities, Harvard Management Seed Capital, SoftBank Opportunity Fund, and a diverse group of angel investors.

The Genesis of Runway

Runway was conceived by co-founders Gabriel Savit, Isabel Barrera, David Filion, and Matt Varghese. These individuals previously collaborated on the first mobile application team at Rent the Runway.

During their time there, they identified significant inefficiencies in the app release workflow, characterized by substantial time investment and frequent internal communication overhead – often conducted through platforms like Slack.

Coordinating releases required constant updates between interdisciplinary teams – encompassing engineers, product managers, marketing specialists, designers, and quality assurance personnel – a process frequently relying on shared documents and spreadsheets.

A Dedicated Release Management Solution

Runway presents a focused software solution specifically engineered to manage the complexities inherent in the application release cycle.

The platform seamlessly integrates with existing development tools, such as GitHub, JIRA, Trello, Bitrise, and CircleCI, automatically providing teams with status updates on completed tasks and outstanding action items.

Since the commencement of its beta program earlier this year, Runway has doubled the number of integrations it supports. These now encompass Linear, Pivotal Tracker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Travis CI, Slack, Bugsnag, Sentry, TestRail, and further integrations are planned.

Early Adoption and Growth

During its beta testing phase, Runway was utilized by several early adopters, including ClassPass, Kickstarter, and Capsule. These customers collectively deployed over 40 app releases through the platform as of March.

The company has experienced a tenfold increase in its client base since the beta launch, now serving Gusto, NTWRK, Brex, and Chick-fil-A, alongside larger enterprise clients. (Notably, one client is described as a “favorite food delivery app”.)

Customers have voiced strong support for Runway, citing improvements over previous methods. Sanjay Thakur, Mobile Lead at ClassPass, reported “less confusion” and reduced release time.

Customer Testimonials

• Sanjay Thakur (ClassPass): “Our engineers tell me their load during sprints in the release manager role has shrunk.”
• Hari Singh (Kickstarter): “Things are easier now… it’s nice to have all of our team members looking at the same thing, all the time. There’s no subjective opinion of what’s happening.”
• Dave Cowart (NTWRK): “Runway has not only made releases faster, but mental stress around releases is something we don’t have to worry about anymore… We used to be hesitant to release as often as we would have liked. Now, we know it’s going to go smoothly, and we know it’s going to require minimal effort.”

Platform Enhancements and Milestones

Since March, Runway’s users have collectively executed over 700 app releases – a sixty-fold increase. Significant product updates and enhancements have also been implemented.

These include expanded automation capabilities, such as automatically pausing unstable phased releases, accelerating stable ones, generating default release notes, supporting Android rollouts with staged percentages, selecting the latest builds, submitting builds for beta review, tagging releases, autogenerating changelogs, and attaching artifacts.

Additional Features and Security

Runway now supports quicker hotfix releases, incorporates an approvals feature for external stakeholders, provides a screenshot viewer and approval gate, allows build artifact downloads directly from CI pipelines, integrates with regression and stability monitoring tools, and supports TestFlight and Play Store beta track testing.

Further additions include version number bumping, role-based access control, and SOC 2 certification.

Future Development and Pricing

The company is currently focused on simplifying the onboarding process for new customers. While the platform’s broad capabilities require initial setup, Runway believes its adaptability to diverse toolsets will be a key differentiator.

Runway’s standard tier remains priced at $400 per month per application, with custom enterprise pricing now available for larger organizations. Pricing options for independent teams may be introduced in the future.

Looking Ahead

The newly acquired funds will be allocated to expanding the team, specifically hiring full-stack engineers (with a preference for those with mobile development experience) and a dedicated growth and marketing professional. A senior mobile engineer has already joined the team.