Runtime vs Convey

Convey and Runtime at a glance

Convey builds digital teammates for enterprise operations. Operators describe a process or share their screen, and the teammate observes, learns, and takes over the work, escalating to a person only when something looks wrong. Each teammate has its own identity (an email address, credentials, and role-based access to the apps it needs) and works both through APIs and OAuth and by clicking through software like a person, which makes it strong in older systems. According to a16z, Convey compiles what it learns into versioned, testable programs so it behaves the same across many runs. Published customers include NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Samsara, Unity, Faire, and ChargePoint, with use cases such as invoice processing, order entry, campaign operations, and month-end reconciliation. Convey raised a $38M Series A led by a16z in June 2026. It is for operators in finance, accounting, ad ops, and other back-office teams who want automation without engineers.

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Payment ops, risk, compliance, finance, underwriting, onboarding, and support build agents from their SOPs. Each agent works on its own isolated computer in your cloud, reaches your ledger, processor, and bank portals through APIs, databases, CLIs, MCP servers, and a browser, and stops for a person before anything moves money. It is for operations leaders at payment companies, banks, and lenders who need many agents running on regulated data.

Good products with a lot in common: both believe in governed agents doing real operational work. They differ on domain, where agents run, and who owns the result.

How they differ

Learning by demonstration vs code you own

Convey's training model is its best feature. Showing a teammate a process on screen, the way you would onboard a remote hire, is the fastest way to automate work trapped in a legacy UI, and Convey turns what it learns into versioned programs that run reliably.

Runtime starts from your SOPs and lets agents reason through the cases that do not fit them. Once a process is solved, the agent can turn it into a script that runs deterministically as a template. That code lives in your repos, so your engineers can review it, test it, and own it if it becomes mission-critical. For a payments team, that matters when the process is part of how money moves and someone will ask to see exactly what runs.

Where agents run and which models they use

Convey publishes a strong security posture: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, regular penetration testing, SAML SSO, isolated agent identities, audit logs, tenant-specific sandboxed execution environments, and zero data retention with its model providers. It is a hosted platform, and it does not publish a bring-your-own-cloud or bring-your-own-model option.

Runtime runs agent computers in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or you self-host the whole platform with Helm, and you can bring your own sandbox provider. You can use any model, including open-weight models served inside your cloud for PCI and PII work, with harness routing (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode), model routing, and fallbacks when a provider goes down. Card numbers and SSNs are stripped from prompts and logs.

Fintech domain depth

Convey is horizontal: finance, HR, marketing, accounting, support, sales, legal, and ad ops, with its published stories mostly in media, advertising, distribution, and accounting.

Runtime is built for money movement. Payment work is mostly exceptions: a held payout, an ACH return with an odd code, a dispute where the evidence contradicts the claim. Agents start read-only, and approvals sit in front of releasing a payout, applying a reserve, booking a ledger entry, or replying to a sponsor bank. Every run is recorded end to end, and the record your sponsor bank asks for stays with you.

How you get to production

Convey offers a 30-day onboarding with what it calls "forward deployed" IT specialists and dedicated solutions engineers, and says operators can stand up a teammate in hours.

Runtime pairs you with a forward-deployed AI engineer whose team built payment and fintech infrastructure at Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, and BlackRock's AI quant group, including risk, underwriting, and reconciliation systems. The FDE maps your processes, builds the first agents with your team, sets up guardrails, and trains admins, so your people keep running it after the FDE leaves.

One investigation across teams

A single stuck payment touches four teams: support gets the ticket, payment ops traces it, finance sees a recon break, and risk or compliance may review it. On Runtime it is one investigation with one record, and each run adds to the organization's memory of resolved tickets, fraud caught, and reconciliation edge cases.

Where Convey is stronger

• Train by demonstration. Share your screen and the teammate learns the process.
• Legacy UIs. Comfortable clicking through older systems with no usable API.
• Breadth across departments. Finance, accounting, HR, ad ops, sales, and legal on one platform.
• Published compliance. SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA, with BAAs for qualifying customers.
• Named enterprise references. NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Samsara, Unity, Faire, and ChargePoint.

Pricing

Convey: Pricing is not published; it is sold through sales. Convey says billing is based on a plan that scales with the value you get from the platform.

Runtime has a Free tier ($0, one session), Teams from $99 per seat per month, and Enterprise with custom pricing and self-hosting. Teams usually weigh it against the work of analysts they were about to hire. Rain replaced $250k in vendor spend with Runtime.

Which should you choose

Choose Convey if

• Most of the work lives in legacy UIs and is easiest to show rather than describe
• You want automation across many back-office departments, not one domain
• A hosted platform with SOC 2 and HIPAA covers your requirements
• Operators, not engineers, will own the automations

Choose Runtime if

• Agents work card data, PII, ledgers, or payouts
• Agent computers and models must run in your cloud, or fully self-hosted
• You want solved processes to become code in your own repos
• You need approvals before money moves and a record your sponsor bank will accept
• You want an engineer who has built payment infrastructure to get the first agents live

Frequently asked questions

What is Convey?

Convey is an enterprise platform for digital teammates: AI agents that non-technical operators train by describing a process or sharing their screen. Teammates have their own identity and app permissions, work through APIs and by clicking through software like a person, and flag a human when something is off. Convey raised a $38M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2026.

Is Convey SOC 2 compliant?

Yes. Convey says it is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant, runs regular penetration tests, supports SAML SSO, keeps audit logs, and has zero data retention agreements with its model providers.

Does Convey work for payment operations?

Convey's published customers are mostly in media, advertising, distribution, and accounting, with workflows like invoice processing, order entry, and reconciliation. For payment work on card data, ledgers, and payouts, many fintech teams also need agents in their own cloud, their own models, and approvals before money moves, which is what Runtime is built for.

How much does Convey cost?

Pricing is not published; it is sold through sales, with plans that Convey says scale with the value you get. Runtime has a free tier, Teams from $99 per seat per month, and custom Enterprise pricing.