Runway Raises Millions to Make AI Movie Magic

With a diverse blend of artistic, design, and technical backgrounds, the founders of Runway — Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis, set out to bridge the gap between art and technology. Their shared vision was to democratize access to advanced AI tools and empower creators to work with machine learning in intuitive, visual ways. Runway was born out of a collaboration at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts ITP program, grounded in a shared passion for creativity and a bold vision to redefine digital storytelling. At its heart, the company blends cutting-edge artificial intelligence with intuitive design, empowering artists, filmmakers, and creators to bring their ideas to life seamlessly, imaginatively, and without technical barriers.

From Pixels to Possibilities

The company was launched in 2019 as a model directory that allowed users to deploy and run open-source models for various artistic use cases. As the user base expanded over the years, the startup shifted its focus towards developing ML-based video editing tools. The founders had initially intended to be open to how users might utilize their platform.

Runway’s advanced AI image and video tools allow you to explore ideas in near real-time, closing the gap between idea and execution. Gen-2, one of the world’s first publicly available text-to-video models, is at the forefront of Runway’s innovation. This AI-powered tool lets users generate realistic videos in seconds, simply by entering a text prompt. For example, “a surreal dreamscape with floating islands at sunset.” Unlike traditional animation or CGI, which require specialized teams and tools, Gen-2 uses AI-generated imagery and motion to create videos entirely from scratch. It’s a mode of storytelling by typing.

Paint, Erase, Create

By seamlessly integrating AI into the creative process, the platform offers state-of-the-art tools that simplify complex video editing tasks, eliminating the need for specialized skills or expensive software

Inpainting lets users remove unwanted objects with a simple brushstroke, while background removal isolates subjects instantly—no green screen needed. Motion tracking & smart masks ensure seamless object detection and tracking, making advanced effects effortless. For color grading, AI applies cinematic tones based on simple text descriptions, like “moody 90s drama.”

Runway’s creativity with technology doesn’t end here.  They have taken a step forward with a goal of creating a new media ecosystem with world simulators. It’s an AI system that constructs an internal representation of an environment and uses it to simulate future events within that environment. Research in this area has been limited to controlled settings, such as video games and autonomous driving. The goal of general world models is to represent and simulate a wide range of real-world situations and interactions.

Big Bucks for Big Ideas

To materialize this goal, this New York-based startup has secured over $300M in Series D funding, led by General Atlantic with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, NVIDIA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and other new and existing investors.

This fund will also be used in the newly developed Gen-4, which is their next-generation series of AI models for media generation and world consistency. Gen-4 allows for the precise generation of consistent characters, locations, and objects across scenes. These advancements are not just incremental improvements; they are the foundation for a whole new approach to media creation—an ecosystem built on AI systems that can simulate our world.

As the team described, “Bring any object, location, or character to life with Gen-4.”The company’s funding journey began with a successful Series A round in December 2020, where they secured $8.5 million. This was followed by a $35 million Series B round in 2021 and a $50 million Series C round in December 2022. The company’s funding culminated in June 2023 with an additional $141 million, backed by prominent investors such as Google, NVIDIA, and Salesforce.

As Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela perfectly sums up the company’s mission by “We must move away from viewing AI as a tool for task completion. We should recalibrate to see AI as a creative collaborator, understanding that success isn’t binary but rather exists on a spectrum of subjective interpretation.”