Runway – an applied AI research company building the next generation of creative tools – recently announced it has raised a $141 million extension to its Series C from Google, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and existing investors among others. And now the company will utilize this new funding round to further scale in-house research efforts, expand its team, and continue to bring state-of-the-art multi-modal AI systems to market while building groundbreaking and intuitive product experiences.
Runway has been building the future of creativity through a new generation of AI-powered tools with products used by an Academy-nominated movies, TV shows, media companies, and creatives across industries. And the company’s research team is on the cutting edge of developments in deep learning to ensure that the future of content creation is accessible, controllable, and empowering for artists and creatives.
Since the company’s last funding announcement in December, Runway supercharged its efforts in making content creation accessible to everyone. And the company made huge waves in the world of AI by releasing Gen-1, a major step forward in generated content that allows users to generate video from an input video and either image or text prompts, and Gen-2, the first publicly available text-to-video model. Runway also hosted the first-ever AI Film Festivals, created Runway Studios, and launched a mobile app, further expanding access to AI tools for users.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re rebuilding the creative stack from the ground up and developing impactful research that will be a major force of change across industries. The next phase of storytelling will be highly democratized, and our ultimate goal is to create a more equitable, diverse and creative world through our products and research outputs. We are thrilled to have continued support from investors, partners, and customers who believe in this vision.”
— Runway CEO and co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela
“Generative AI is transforming the content creation industry, breathing new life into stories and ideas that were not imaginable. The Runway team is doing amazing work with NVIDIA accelerated computing in the cloud to push the boundaries of creativity and storytelling for millions of artists globally.”
— Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA
