Company:Runway

From HandWiki
Runway AI, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence, machine learning, software development
Founded2018; 6 years ago (2018)
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York City
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 based in New York City that develops generative artificial intelligence research, models, and products for video, image, and multimedia generation.[1] It is most notable for co-creating the popular image generation AI systems Stable Diffusion [2]and developing the first commercial text-to-video generation AI models Gen-1 and Gen-2.[3][4]

History

The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela[5], Alejandro Matamala, and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP. The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.

On December 2020, Runway raised US$8.5 million[6] in a Series A funding round.

In August of 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.[7]

On September, 2022, the company raised US$35 millions in a Series B funding round.

In February of 2023 Runway released Gen-1 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model[8][9][10] accessible via a simple web interface.

On December 21, 2022 Runway raised U$50 million[11] in a Series C round. Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round at a $1.5 billion valuation[12][13] in June of 2023 from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce[14] to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video content[15].

References

  1. Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/technology/runway-ai-videos.html. 
  2. "Stability AI Is Losing Executives, Engineers and Its Edge" (in en). Bloomberg.com. 2023-08-08. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability-ai-s-lead-threatened-by-departures-concerns-over-ceo. 
  3. "Generative AI’s Next Frontier Is Video" (in en). Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/generative-ai-s-next-frontier-is-video. 
  4. Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model" (in en-US). https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648113/text-to-video-generative-ai-runway-ml-gen-2-model-access. 
  5. "TIME100 AI 2023: Cristóbal Valenzuela" (in en). 2023-09-07. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6308278/cristobal-valenzuela/. 
  6. "RunwayML raises $8.5 million for its AI-powered media creation tools" (in en-US). 2020-12-16. https://venturebeat.com/business/runwayml-raises-8-5-million-for-its-ai-powered-media-creation-tools/. 
  7. Cai, Kenrick. "The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion’s Success Has A History Of Exaggeration" (in en). https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-diffusion-emad-mostaque-stability-ai-exaggeration/. 
  8. Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/technology/runway-ai-videos.html. 
  9. "Generative AI’s Next Frontier Is Video" (in en). Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/generative-ai-s-next-frontier-is-video. 
  10. Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model" (in en-US). https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648113/text-to-video-generative-ai-runway-ml-gen-2-model-access. 
  11. Cai, Kenrick. "Runway Raises $50 Million At $500 Million Valuation As Generative AI Craze Continues" (in en). https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/12/05/runway-ml-series-c-funding-500-million-valuation/. 
  12. "AI Video Startup Runway Raises $141 Million From Google, Nvidia" (in en). Bloomberg.com. 2023-06-29. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/ai-video-startup-runway-raises-141-million-from-google-nvidia. 
  13. Wiggers, Kyle (2023-06-29). "Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators, raises $141M" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/runway-a-startup-building-generative-ai-for-content-creators-raises-141m/. 
  14. "Google Invests in AI Startup Runway to Wrest Cloud Business From AWS". https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-invests-in-ai-startup-runway-to-wrest-cloud-business-from-aws. 
  15. Black, Julia. "‘Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God’: Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism". https://www.theinformation.com/articles/not-everyone-is-trying-to-build-god-runway-ceo-crist-bal-valenzuela-tries-to-dampen-the-doomerism.