Runway AI, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence, machine learning, software development
Founded2018 (2018)
Headquarters
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Cristóbal Valenzuela (CEO)
  • Anastasis Germanidis (CTO)
  • Alejandro Matamala (CDO)
ProductsStable Diffusion, Gen-1, Gen-2
Websiterunwayml.com

Runway AI, Inc. (also known as Runway and RunwayML) is an American company headquartered in New York City that specializes in generative artificial intelligence research and technologies.[1] The company is primarily focused on creating products and models for generating videos, images, and various multimedia content. It is most notable for developing the first commercial text-to-video generative AI models Gen-1 and Gen-2[2][3] and co-creating the research for the popular image generation AI system Stable Diffusion.[4][5]

History

The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela,[6] Alejandro Matamala, and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP.[7] The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.

In December 2020, Runway raised US$8.5 million[8] in a Series A funding round.

On December, 2021, the company raised US$35 million in a Series B funding round.[9]

In August 2022, the company co-released an improved version of their Latent Diffusion model called Stable Diffusion together with the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a compute donation by Stability AI.[10][11]

On December 21, 2022 Runway raised U$50 million[12] in a Series C round. Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round in June 2023 at a $1.5 billion valuation[13][14] from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce[15] to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video production.[16][17]

In February 2023 Runway released Gen-1 and Gen-2 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model[18][19][20] accessible via a simple web interface.

In June 2023 Runway was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the world by TIME magazine.[21]

Services and technologies

Gen-1

Gen-1 is a video-to-video generative AI system that synthesize new videos by applying the composition and style of an image or text prompt to the structure of a source video. The model was released in February 2023. The Gen-1 model was trained and developed by Runway based on the original paper Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models from Runway Research.[22] Gen-1 is an example of Generative artificial intelligence for video creation.

Gen-2

Gen-2 is a multimodal AI system that can generate novel videos with text, images or video clips. The model is a continuation of Gen-1 and includes a modality to generate video conditioned to text. Gen-2 is one of the first commercially available text-to-video models.[23][24][25][26]

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is an open-source deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on the original paper High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models published by Runway and the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.[27][28][29] Stable Diffusion is mostly used to create images conditioned on text descriptions.

AI Film Festival

Runway hosts an annual AI Film Festival[30] in Los Angeles and New York City.[31][32]

References

  1. Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  2. "Generative AI's Next Frontier Is Video". Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  3. Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  4. "Stability AI Is Losing Executives, Engineers and Its Edge". Bloomberg.com. 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  5. "The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  6. "TIME100 AI 2023: Cristóbal Valenzuela". Time. 2023-09-07. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  7. Black, Julia. "'Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God': Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  8. "RunwayML raises $8.5 million for its AI-powered media creation tools". VentureBeat. 2020-12-16. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  9. "Runway raises $35M Series B | Runway Blog". Runway. Retrieved 2023-11-07.
  10. Cai, Kenrick. "The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion's Success Has A History Of Exaggeration". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  11. "The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  12. Cai, Kenrick. "Runway Raises $50 Million At $500 Million Valuation As Generative AI Craze Continues". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  13. "AI Video Startup Runway Raises $141 Million From Google, Nvidia". Bloomberg.com. 2023-06-29. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  14. Wiggers, Kyle (2023-06-29). "Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators, raises $141M". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  15. "Google Invests in AI Startup Runway to Wrest Cloud Business From AWS". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  16. Black, Julia. "'Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God': Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  17. "Featured interview: Runway AI CEO Chris Valenzuela - First Move with Julia Chatterley - Podcast on CNN Audio". CNN. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  18. Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  19. "Generative AI's Next Frontier Is Video". Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  20. Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  21. "TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2023: Runway". Time. 2023-06-21. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
  22. "Gen-1 by Runway". Runway. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  23. "Text to Video Generative AI Is Finally Here and It's Weird as Hell". Gizmodo. 2023-03-22. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  24. Wiggers, Kyle (2023-06-09). "Runway's Gen-2 shows the limitations of today's text-to-video tech". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  25. Avram Piltch (2023-06-08). "Runway's Powerful Gen-2 Text-to-Video Tool Now Available to Everyone for Free". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  26. Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  27. "Stable Diffusion developer Runway raises $50M to create AI multimedia tools". SiliconANGLE. 2022-12-06. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  28. "Stability AI Is Losing Executives, Engineers and Its Edge". Bloomberg.com. 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  29. "The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  30. "Runway AI Film Festival". Runway. Retrieved 2023-11-18.
  31. Melendez, Steven. "A new film festival will only show movies made using AI".
  32. Kokalitcheva, Kia. "1 big movie thing: an AI-generated film festival".
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