Runway started by helping filmmakers — now it wants to beat Google at AI

AI video generation startup Runway doesn’t have the typical Silicon Valley pedigree. No Stanford founders, no ex-Google founders, no nine-figure seed round that gave them time to ignore revenue. The three founders – two from Chile and one from Greece – met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and built the company in New York.

Runway could also be one of the most consequential AI companies today, depending on who you ask. Not because of what it has built, but because of what it is trying to build next.

In recent years, the AI ​​industry has largely operated on the assumption that intelligence lives in language. Major language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reflect that bet.

Runway, along with other competitors, makes another. The founders believe that the next form of AI intelligence will not be built from text, but from video and world models that learn how the world works, not just how people describe it. That distinction sounds academic. Its implications are not.

Runway co-founder and co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis said training models directly on observational data from the world is the next frontier of AI. The companies that get there first, he argues, won’t be the ones that perfected the language.

“We are basically tied to our own understanding of reality,” Germanidis told TechCrunch from Runway’s homey, sunlight-filled headquarters near Union Square.

“Language models are trained all over the internet, on message boards and social media, in textbooks – distilling existing human knowledge,” Germanidis continued. “But to move forward, we need to use less biased data.”

Founded in 2018, Runway has built its reputation on video generation models (including the latest generation 4.5) and AI tools that let people turn text prompts into editable, cinematic content.

Today, Runway’s technology powers production workflows for filmmakers and advertising agencies, and the company has signed deals with major media players such as Lionsgate and AMC Networks. The tools have even been used in films like “Everything everywhere at once.”

Runway is now valued at $5.3 billion and according to one of its founders added $40 million in annual recurring revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

If Runway’s bet that video generation is the path to world modeling pays off, the results will be felt from Hollywood to drug discovery. If not, Runway risks being overtaken by competitors with much deeper pockets, including Google chief.

Taking the leap

Over the past six months, the startup has put its plan into action and expanded beyond video generation. In December, the startup launched its first global model, with plans to launch another this year. (World models are AI systems that simulate environments well enough to predict how they will behave.)

Runway isn’t alone in looking to turn physics-aware video models into world models, with near-term use cases in interactive entertainment, gaming and robotics training. Startups Luma and World Labs are on a similar trajectory, and Google has been moving its Genie world model in the same direction.

Everyone is looking for a version of the same thing: AI that solves humanity’s toughest problems. That’s a far cry from Runway’s original product, but it’s the result of both emerging opportunities in technology and the founders’ inclination to follow where it led.

Germanidis, for his part, views world models as scientific infrastructure. The more sensory data and observations you train with one model, the closer you get to a working digital twin of the universe – one on which you can run experiments faster than any laboratory. A large part of the scientific process consists of waiting for results, he emphasizes. If you could compress that waiting, you could compress progress itself.

“If we can build a better scientist than human scientists, we can accelerate progress in the way we understand the universe and how we solve problems,” Germanidis said.

The moonshot

Germanidis fell in love with programming as an 11-year-old in Athens and came to the US at 18 to study neuroscience and film. He returned to computer science and worked at several tech companies in Silicon Valley before deciding he had had enough of the culture. Born and raised in Santiago, co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela studied economics as an undergraduate before working in film and then software. Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, another Santiago resident, studied advertising and ran a design firm.

The three met in 2016 while attending NYU’s ITP (Interactive Communications Program), a graduate program that Valenzuela described as an “art school for engineers.”

According to Matamala Ortiz, the co-founders had all aspired to become filmmakers at some point in their lives. So Runway started with a simple mission: can we use AI to turn anyone into a filmmaker?

According to Matamala Ortiz, after releasing their first video generation model in February 2023 – which is staggeringly unimpressive compared to what Runway is releasing today – that mission evolved into: Can we make everyone Great filmmaker?

It required growing the team into what it is today. The company has 155 employees across offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv and most recently Tokyo. “But in 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 things,” he added.

Things like robotics, drug discovery and climate modeling – the kinds of problems that have baffled researchers for decades. Last year, Runway launched a robotics unit that Germanidis says has already resulted in real-world testing and deployments.

Germanidis, like others, sees the field moving in this direction training a single model on many different modalities – text, video, voice and other sensors – and thinks it’s the composite effect that matters.

His own goal for Runway’s technology, if given enough time and resources, is biological world modeling and anti-aging research.

Whether Runway can extend its video dominance to global models is far from certain, and the competition isn’t waiting. Runway was one of the first to develop AI video generation, but world models are a different breed with deep-rooted and respected competitors. Google, former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun, AI’s ‘godmother’ Fei-Fei Li and a growing number of startups are all pursuing the same goal.

Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of a company that benchmarks AI skills Worker and a lecturer at Stanford, pointed out that no one has yet proven the leap between video intelligence and generalized reasoning via world models, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. He said if Runway wants to make its global model gamble a reality, the company will have to continue gathering resources, including its computer chief.

Runway has deals with KernWeef And Nvidia but won’t confirm whether it has dedicated cluster access – the kind of guaranteed, large-scale computing power that training frontier models requires.

“How are you going to build a fundamental model without a cluster?” Katanforoosh 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 like AMD Ventures and Nvidia. That’s roughly in line with its most direct competitors, Luma AI and World Labs, which have raised $900 million and $1.29 billion, respectively, according to PitchBook.

But Runway is also competing against incumbents like OpenAI, which has raised about $175 billion according to CEO Sam Altmanand tech giant Google, whose parent company Alphabet is worth $4.86 trillion. Google is Runway’s biggest threat. The company’s Veo model competes directly with Runway’s video generation business, while the Genie world model focuses on the same long-term territory that Runway is racing towards.

Katanforoosh gave a nod to OpenAI, which closed its video platform Sora in March after burning through about $1 million a day in computing costs and barely $2.1 million in revenue, according to some estimates. His point: Resources alone do not guarantee survival. They don’t guarantee it for Runway either.

Katanforoosh doesn’t write off Runway. He pointed to AI audio startup ElevenLabs, which has outperformed OpenAI and Google on their own benchmarks, despite having the resources and background of both. Runway, he argues, could follow a similar playbook.

The comparison is not lost on Runway’s founders. Valenzuela says the startup’s lack of Bay Area standardization gives them an edge. Not only do they have a diversity of ideas, he argues, but without the ties to Silicon Valley they also had to be smarter, lacking the war chest that many of their peers had access to and that would have protected them from the need to raise revenue early.

And according to Michelle Kwon, Runway’s chief operating officer, the company is in no rush to raise more money, even as demand for computers increases as its scale increases.

“Their backgrounds have allowed them to be early, be right more often than not, and build a culture that moves incredibly quickly,” early investor Michael Dempsey, managing partner at Compound, told TechCrunch.

For Valenzuela, that culture starts first and foremost with how he sees the world. What free time he has, he spends – not much, as co-CEO and new father – reading books, including the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, whom he describes as the antithesis of Pablo Neruda: less formal, less academic, with the view that poetry belongs to the people rather than rules.

“Rules are just rules they invented,” Valenzuela said. “That’s the driving force behind how we do things at Runway. They say Silicon Valley is here and that’s where the startups are. Why? Those are just made up rules. Scrap them all and start over.”