Why AI companies are building ecosystems in 2026?

Something raised in the last couple of months. And it's worth paying attention to.

Runway launched a $10M venture fund + free API credits for startups yesterday. Perplexity launched a $50M fund for seed-stage companies. CoreWeave Ventures launched in September. OpenAI has been running its Startup Fund for a while now.

Every major AI company is suddenly in the business of funding the companies that build on top of them. And this is platform strategy.

We've seen this playbook before:

-Apple's App Store has over 1.8 million apps. (this was in 2024, probably is over 2 million nowadays) Apple didn't build them. It built the platform and let others do the work.

- Stripe powers over 5 million businesses globally. Stripe doesn't run those businesses. It became the layer they can't operate without.

The pattern is always the same: control the platform, and you capture value from everything built on top of it.

Runway has 150 people and a $5.3B valuation. They can't build every use case themselves, but they can fund the startups that will, lock them into their API, and become the foundation of a new ecosystem before anyone else does.

The question I am curious right now:

• Is the product you're building a tool or a platform others will build on?

• And if a major AI company offered you free credits and early funding, would you take it or does that make you part of their ecosystem instead of your own?