Runway, formally Runway AI, is a company founded in 2018 in New York City by Cristobal Valenzuela, Anastasis Germanidis, and Alejandro Matamala, who met as students at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The company positioned itself from its earliest days at the intersection of machine learning research and creative production tools, building software aimed at filmmakers, editors, and visual artists rather than at general consumers or developers.
Early role in Stable Diffusion
Before becoming primarily known for video generation, Runway played a significant, often underrecognized role in the development of Stable Diffusion: the company collaborated with the Munich CompVis research group and helped fund and support the training of the original latent diffusion model that Stability AI later financed at production scale and released publicly in 2022. Runway continued developing its own Text-to-image generation and editing tools alongside this collaboration.
Gen series video models
Runway released Gen-1 in February 2023, a model that could restyle existing video footage guided by a text prompt or reference image, followed by Gen-2 later that year, one of the first widely available Text-to-video generation systems capable of generating short video clips from a text description alone. Subsequent releases, Gen-3 Alpha in 2024 and Gen-4 in 2025, improved temporal consistency, motion quality, and control, competing directly with OpenAI's Sora, Google DeepMind's Veo, and Chinese entrants such as Kling and Seedance in an increasingly crowded video generation field built on Diffusion model and related architectures.
Hollywood partnerships and reception
Runway distinguished itself from some rivals by actively courting the film and television industry rather than treating professional production as a secondary market: it partnered with the studio Lionsgate in 2024 to train a custom model on the studio's film library for use in production and marketing workflows, and it ran an annual AI Film Festival showcasing short films made with generative tools. These partnerships drew both interest from filmmakers exploring new production techniques and criticism from actors, writers, and visual effects workers concerned about job displacement, a tension that also featured in the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes over AI use in film and television production. Runway raised significant venture funding, including rounds backed by Google and Nvidia, reaching a valuation reported above three billion dollars by 2025, and it continued to expand its product suite toward general-purpose "world model" style tools aimed at simulating physical environments for creative and research use, an ambition it shared with broader World model research across the field.