AI video generation startup Runway doesn’t have your typical Silicon Valley pedigree. There were no Stanford co-founders, no ex-Google co-founders, no nine-figure seed round that allowed them time to ignore revenue. Its three founders – two from Chile, one from Greece – met at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and built the company in New York.
Runway could also, depending on who you ask, be one of the hottest AI companies today. Not because of what you’ve built, but because of what you’re trying to build next.
Over the past several years, the AI industry has largely operated on the premise that intelligence lives in language. Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, reflect this bet.
Runway, along with other competitors, is creating something different. Its founders believe that the next form of AI will not be built from text, but from video and global models that learn how the world works, not just how humans describe it. This distinction seems academic. Its effects are not.
Training models directly on observational data from the world is the next frontier for artificial intelligence, said Anastasis Germanides, co-founder and co-CEO of Runway. He argues that the companies that get there first will not be the ones that have mastered the language.
“We’re fundamentally committed to our understanding of reality,” Germanides told TechCrunch from Runway’s sun-filled headquarters near Union Square.
“Linguistic models are being trained all over the Internet, on message boards and social media, on textbooks – to extract current human knowledge,” Germanides continued. “But to get beyond that, we need to take advantage of less biased data.”
Founded in 2018, Runway has built its reputation on video creation models – including the latest Gen-4.5 – and AI tools that let people turn text prompts into editable, cinematic content.
Today, Runway’s technology enhances production workflows for filmmakers and advertising agencies, and the company has signed deals with major media companies such as Lionsgate and AMC Networks. Its tools have been used in films such as Everything Everywhere at Once.
Runway is now worth $5.3 billion and, according to one of its founders, has added $40 million in annual recurring revenue in the second quarter of 2026.
If Runway’s bet that video production is the path to world-class modeling pays off, the result will be felt from Hollywood to drug discovery. If not, Runway risks being outdone by rivals with much deeper pockets, including Google.
Take the leap
Within the past six months, the startup has put its plan into action and expanded beyond video production, launching its first global model in December, with plans to launch another this year. (Global models are artificial intelligence systems that simulate environments well enough to predict how they will behave.)
Runway is not alone in its quest to transform physics-aware video models into universal ones, with near-term use cases in interactive entertainment, gaming, and robotics training. Startups Luma and World Labs are on a similar path, and Google has pointed its Genie World model in the same direction.
Everyone is after some version of the same thing: artificial intelligence that solves humanity’s toughest problems. This is a far cry from Runway’s original product, but a result of both emerging capabilities in the technology and founders who were willing to follow where it led.
For his part, Germanides sees global models as scientific infrastructure. The more data and sensory observations you train a single model on, the closer you get to a working digital twin of the universe, one you can experiment on faster than any laboratory could. He points out that much of the scientific process is just waiting for results. If you can compress that wait, you can compress progress itself.
“If we can build a better world than human scientists do, we can accelerate progress in how we understand the universe and how we solve problems,” Germanides said.
Moon shot
Germanides fell in love with programming when he was 11 years old in Athens and came to the United States at 18 to study neuroscience and film. He returned to computer science, and worked at several technology companies in Silicon Valley before deciding that he had had enough of the culture. Co-CEO Cristobal Valenzuela, born and raised in Santiago, studied economics as a university student before working in film and then software. Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, another Santiago native, studied advertising and ran a design company.
The three met in 2016 while attending New York University’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), a graduate program that Valenzuela describes as a “technical school for engineers.”
The founders all aspired to be filmmakers at certain points in their lives, according to Matamala Ortiz. So Runway started with a simple mission: Can we use AI to make everyone a filmmaker?
After launching its first video generation prototype in February 2023 – which is astonishingly modest compared to what Runway is rolling out today – that mission has evolved into: Can we make everyone great The director, according to Matamala Ortiz.
It took a lot to develop the team into what it is today. The company employs 155 workers spread across offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv and, most recently, Tokyo. “But through this process, we’ve learned that these models can understand how the world works, and if you scale them up, they can be useful for many other different things,” he added.
Things like robotics, drug discovery, and climate modeling-the kinds of problems that have puzzled researchers for decades. Last year, Runway launched a robotics module that Germanides says has already led to real-world testing and deployments.
Germanides, like others, sees the field moving toward training a single model on many different modalities – text, video, audio, other sensors – and believes a compounding effect is the goal.
His most important goal for Runway’s technology, given enough time and resources, is biological world models and anti-aging research.
Runway’s ability to transfer its video dominance to global supermodels has yet to be determined, and the competition isn’t waiting. Runway was among the first companies to do AI video production, but global models are a different race with established and well-respected competitors. Google, former chief Meta scientist Yann LeCun, AI “godmother” Fei-Fei Li, and a growing group of startups are all pursuing the same goal.
No one has yet proven the leap between video intelligence and generalized reasoning via universal models, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, noted Kian Katanforoush, CEO of AI skills measurement company Workera and a lecturer at Stanford University. If Runway wants to turn its global model bet into reality, it will need to continue amassing resources, the most important of which is computing, he said.
Runway has deals with CoreWeave and Nvidia, but has not confirmed whether it has dedicated access to clusters – the kind of large-scale guaranteed compute that frontier training models require.
“How are you going to build a foundational model without a group?” – Qatanfourush asked. “I don’t think anyone can do that.”
Runway has raised $860 million to date, including a $315 million round in February from strategic partners such as AMD Ventures and Nvidia. That’s roughly in line with its direct competitors, Luma AI and World Labs, which have raised $900 million and $1.29 billion, respectively, according to PitchBook.
But Runway is also up against established companies like OpenAI, which has raised about $175 billion per CEO Sam Altman, and tech giant Google, whose parent company Alphabet is valued at $4.86 trillion. Google is the biggest threat to Runway. The company’s Veo model competes directly with Runway’s video creation business, while its global Genie model targets the same long-term territory that Runway is racing toward.
Katanforoush nodded at OpenAI, which shut down video platform Sora in March after spending nearly $1 million a day in computing costs with revenue of barely $2.1 million according to some estimates. His point: Resources alone do not guarantee survival. They don’t guarantee it for Runway either.
Katanforş does not write Runway off. He pointed to AI-powered audio startup ElevenLabs, which outperformed OpenAI and Google in its own benchmarks, despite lacking the resources and pedigree in either. He argues that Runway could follow a similar playbook.
The comparison between Runway’s founders is not lost. Valenzuela says the startup’s lack of “standardization” in the Bay Area gives it an advantage. Not only are their ideas diverse, he stresses, but that without their connections to Silicon Valley, they would have been more fragmented, lacking the financial resources that many of their peers have that would insulate them from the need to generate revenue early on.
According to Michelle Kwon, Runway’s chief operating officer, the company is in no rush to raise more money, even as computing requirements increase with scale.
“Their background has pushed them to be early, to be right more often, and to build a culture that moves incredibly quickly,” early investor Michael Dempsey, managing partner at Compound, told TechCrunch..
For Valenzuela, that culture starts with how he sees the world in the first place. He spends any free time he has – not much, as a co-CEO and a new father – reading books, including by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, whom he describes as the antithesis of Pablo Neruda: less formal, less academic, and espousing the view that poetry belongs to the people, not to the rules.
“The rules are just rules they invented,” Valenzuela said. “This is the driving force of how we do things at Runway. They say Silicon Valley exists and this is where the startups are. Why? These are just made-up rules. Wipe them all out and start over.”
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