Runway

Runway was formed in 2018 and originated at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) was essential education for him and his co-founders and “it’s where Runway was born”; Dan Shiffman and Gene Kogan were early advisors.⁠[1][2][3][4][2]

In June 2019 Runway released its beta version, positioned as a platform to help creatives use and make sense of machine learning; its users included filmmakers, designers, VFX and CGI professionals, artists, coders, musicians and educators.⁠[5][5][5]

In December 2020 Runway announced an $8.5 million Series A led by Amplify Partners, with Lux Capital and Compound Ventures participating, with the aim of building the next generation of machine learning–powered creative tools.⁠[2][2]

In December 2021 Runway raised a $35 million Series B led by CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry with participation from all its existing investors, focused on transforming video editing with automation and machine learning.⁠[6][6]

Runway researcher Patrick Esser co-authored, with researchers from LMU Munich and Heidelberg University, “High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models,” which proposed training diffusion models in the latent space of pretrained autoencoders to greatly reduce computational requirements. Runway says its research and the open-source release of Stable Diffusion forever transformed the generative AI landscape.⁠[7][7][7][1]

In December 2022 Runway closed a $50 million Series C led by Felicis, with Madrona and the leaders of companies including Vercel, Replit and Airtable joining as angels. Runway then had more than 30 “AI Magic Tools,” customers including CBS, Publicis and New Balance, and an in-house creative agency.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In February 2023 Runway released the video generation model Gen-1, which applies the composition and style of an image or text prompt to a source video to generate a new one; the subsequent Gen-2 added modes including generating video from text alone. Runway says that in user studies Gen-1’s results were preferred over Stable Diffusion 1.5 and Text2Live.⁠[8][8][9][9][8]

In June 2023 Runway announced a $141 million extension to its Series C with participation from Google, NVIDIA and Salesforce VenturesSalesforce VenturesSalesforce Ventures is Salesforce’s corporate venture capital arm. Active since 2009, it backs companies from seed through growth across enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, data, security and AI. Salesforce supplies all of its capital.Open the full entry, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Its tools were then used by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.⁠[10][11][10]

In October 2023 Runway partnered with CanvaCanvaCanva is an online design platform company headquartered in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 2012 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams and launched in 2013, it offers template-based drag-and-drop design tools for non-designers and later expanded into team collaboration, video, email, forms and generative AI features.Open the full entry to make Gen-2 video generation available to Canva’s 150 million monthly users through Canva’s Magic Media app.⁠[12]

In December 2023 Runway announced a long-term research effort on “general world models”: a world model is an AI system that builds an internal representation of an environment and simulates future events within it, and the goal is to simulate the wide range of situations and interactions found in the real world; Runway regards video generation systems such as Gen-2 as very early and limited forms of general world models.⁠[13][13][13][13]

In June 2024 Runway introduced Gen-3 Alpha, trained on new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training, describing it as a major improvement over Gen-2 in fidelity, consistency and motion and releasing it with a new in-house visual moderation system and C2PA provenance standards.⁠[14][14][14]

In July 2024, 404 Media reporter Samantha Cole disclosed a leaked internal spreadsheet indicating that the training data for Gen-3 (internally codenamed Jupiter) included videos scraped from thousands of popular YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry creators and brand channels as well as pirated films. The spreadsheets listed nearly 4,000 YouTube channels, including Disney, Netflix and Pixar, and a separate “Non-YouTube Source” list included links to animation and film piracy sites; a former employee said the company used proxies to avoid being blocked by Google when downloading the videos. A YouTube spokesperson reiterated CEO Neal Mohan’s statement that training on its videos was a “clear violation” of its terms.⁠[11][11][11][15][15][15][15][15]

Runway did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. Earlier, when asked in June where Gen-3’s training data came from, co-founder Anastasis Germanidis declined to give specifics, saying only that an in-house research team oversaw all training and used “curated, internal datasets.”⁠[15][11][11]

In the class action Andersen v. Stability AI (Case No. 23-cv-00201-WHO), brought by artists against Stability AI, MidjourneyMidjourneyMidjourney is a self-funded artificial intelligence research lab founded in San Francisco by David Holz, best known for its namesake text-to-image service, which opened to the public through Discord in 2022 and later expanded to the web, video models, and medical hardware. It has been sued by artists and by companies including Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery over copyright issues involving its training data and generated content.Open the full entry, DeviantArt and Runway AI, the plaintiffs allege that the companies scraped artworks online to train their models in violation of copyright. On August 12, 2024, U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick ruled on the amended complaint: of the four infringement theories against Runway, Runway did not at that stage challenge the three direct-infringement theories (training on protected works, the model itself being an infringing copy, and distributing the model), and the judge also allowed the fourth claim, inducing infringement by end users, to proceed.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16][16]

On September 16, 2024, Runway launched an API for its Gen-3 Alpha Turbo model, with early partners including the advertising group Omnicom and initial access for large teams and organizations. On September 18, Runway and Lionsgate announced a partnership to train a custom model on Lionsgate’s proprietary catalog for its filmmakers’ use in pre-production and post-production; Lionsgate Vice Chair Michael Burns said it would help the company develop capital-efficient content creation opportunities.⁠[17][17][17][4][4][4]

In September 2024 Runway and Runway Studios launched the Hundred Film Fund to help fund one hundred films that use AI to tell their stories; the fund started at $5 million with the potential to grow to $10 million, with grants ranging from $5,000 to more than $1 million plus $2 million in Runway credits.⁠[18][18][18]

On March 31, 2025, Runway released Gen-4, saying it could generate consistent characters, locations and objects across lighting conditions, scenes and treatments from a single reference image, without fine-tuning or additional training, solving the character consistency problem that had been a core limitation of video generation.⁠[19][20][20][20][20]

In April 2025 Runway announced more than $300 million in Series D funding led by General Atlantic, with participation from Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, NVIDIA and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, among others, to expand its own AI film and animation studio, Runway Studios, and its media generation research.⁠[21][21]

In June 2025 Runway and AMC Networks announced a partnership to use Runway’s models and tools in AMC Networks’ marketing and TV development processes, including promotional material, campaign ideation and pre-visualization during development.⁠[22][22]

In July 2025 Runway released Aleph, an in-context video model that can perform a wide range of edits on an input video, such as adding, removing and transforming objects, generating other angles of a scene, and changing style and lighting.⁠[23][23]

On December 1, 2025, Runway released Gen-4.5, built on NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, which as of November 30, 2025, ranked first on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard with 1,247 Elo points. On December 11, Runway released its first family of general world models, GWM-1: an autoregressive model built on Gen-4.5 that generates frame by frame in real time and can be controlled with actions such as camera pose, robot commands and audio, in three variants: GWM Worlds for explorable environments, GWM Avatars for conversational characters and GWM Robotics for robotic manipulation.⁠[24][24][24][25][25][25]

On February 10, 2026, Runway announced a $315 million Series E led by General Atlantic, with participation from NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures, AllianceBernstein, AMD VenturesAMD VenturesAMD Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of semiconductor company AMD. It backs AI models, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, silicon and interconnect technologies, and provides portfolio companies with compute, engineering and market support. Its predecessor was the AMD Fusion Fund; AMD used the Ventures name in an official 2012 announcement.Open the full entry, Fidelity, Mirae Asset, Felicis and Premji Invest, among others, to pre-train the next generation of world models. On February 26, Runway announced that co-founder Anastasis Germanidis would serve as co-CEO alongside Cristóbal Valenzuela, and named Kamil Sindi chief technology officer, Michelle Kwon chief operating officer, Anna Chalon chief people officer and Jamie Umpherson chief creative officer.⁠[26][26][27][27]

In May 2026 Runway introduced Runway Agent: after a user describes what they need in a single conversation, the agent proposes a concept, story beats and visual direction and builds a ready-to-publish video with multiple scenes, voiceover, dialogue and music, aimed at brand teams, marketers, creative agencies and filmmakers.⁠[28][28][28][28]

In September 2026 Runway launched a plugin that runs inside Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, letting users generate, edit and upscale without leaving the timeline and use Aleph 2 to re-render a whole clip at the source’s duration.⁠[29][29][29]

On September 30, 2026, Runway held the Runway AI Summit at The Masonic in San Francisco, covering the use of video generation in enterprise creative workflows, world models in robotics and physical AI, and U.S. AI policy. That afternoon’s panel, “Building, Selling and Implementing Creativity at Scale,” featured Canva’s head of AI research Stefano Corazza, ElevenLabs chief revenue officer Ashley KramerAshley KramerAshley Kramer is a technology executive who has been chief revenue officer of the voice AI company ElevenLabs since September 2026. She previously led enterprise sales at OpenAI and earlier served as chief marketing and strategy officer of GitLab, chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense, and senior vice president of product and marketing at Alteryx.Open the full entry and Nebius chief marketing officer Lindsey IrvineLindsey IrvineLindsey Irvine is a technology marketing executive who has been chief marketing officer of the AI cloud company Nebius since August 2026. She previously led global marketing at Square and served as chief marketing officer of the biotech R&D software company Benchling and of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company.Open the full entry, discussing what it takes to build, ship and commercialize AI products that creative professionals actually adopt and how marketing leaders can get real value out of AI products.⁠[30][30][30][30][30]

Runway: Official website: https://runway.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

X: Public account: https://x.com/runwayml (opens in a new window)⁠[32]