The migration to Vercel cut build times and enabled the Runway team to review, iterate, and ship faster.

Runway is an applied AI research company providing next-generation creation tools to users around the world. As a small company that prioritizes speed and innovation, every second counts.

Speed of execution is important for AI companies like Runway, and Vercel has been fundamental in helping us achieve that.

Diego Alarcón, Front-End Developer

The team at Runway originally deployed their six sites using a combination of Netlify, GitHub Pages, and their own custom build process. While this performed well for them in the beginning, after a period of growth, they needed a faster tech stack that could manage all six of their sites and scale along with them. Propagation of their domain name system (DNS) could take hours, and builds took minutes more than they had to spare. “After migrating to Vercel in just a few hours build times went from 5-8 minutes on Netlify + GitHub Pages to just 40s on Vercel,” says Alarcón.

Vercel utilizes AWS Bedrock's managed foundation models to enhance their AI-powered development tools and services, delivering scalable generative AI capabilities that help developers build and deploy applications more efficiently across their platform.

Runway’s developers were also able to speed up feedback cycles with Vercel Preview Deployments. “Having inline comments built within the staging link is a killer feature and has saved us a lot of time” explains Emily Golden, a member of Runway’s growth marketing team. Whether stakeholders are reviewing copy or brand design implementation, the process is much smoother being able to comment directly in the browser without having to go into Figma.

Not only has Runway’s team shed time off builds and review cycles, but they’re also more confident in the performance of their sites. With Vercel Analytics, they’re able to use one dashboard to see the health and status of all of their websites—and they can rest assured that their end users are getting a great experience with Lighthouse scores of 97% for performance.

Would your team benefit from faster builds and shorter feedback loops? Get in touch.