Runway Announces $141M in Funding to Expand Multi-Modal AI Research and Product Deployment

June 29, 2023 at 09:00 AM EDT

Generative AI market leader extends Series C round; fuels growth for the next generation of content creation

Runway, an applied AI research company building the next generation of creative tools, today announced it has raised a $141 million extension to its Series C from Google, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and existing investors, among others. The company will leverage this new financing to further scale in-house research efforts, expand its world-class team, and continue to bring state-of-the-art multi-modal AI systems to market, while building groundbreaking and intuitive product experiences.

Runway is building the future of creativity through a new generation of AI-powered tools, with products used by an Academy-nominated movie, TV shows, media companies, and creatives across industries. 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.

“We’re rebuilding the creative stack from the ground up and developing impactful research that will be a major force of change across industries,” said Runway CEO and co-founder, Cristóbal Valenzuela. “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.”

Pushing Creativity Forward

Since the company’s last funding announcement in December, Runway has supercharged its efforts to make content creation accessible to everyone. The company made huge waves in the world of AI by releasing Gen-1, a major step forward in generated content which 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.

“Generative AI is transforming the content creation industry, breathing new life into stories and ideas that were not imaginable,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “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.”

About Runway

Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment and human creativity. The company conducts research in multi-modal AI systems, builds infrastructure to safely deploy models, and invents products and applications that leverage new techniques for multimedia content. To learn more and sign up for a free account visit www.runwayml.com.