Runway started by supporting filmmakers. Now it wants to beat Google in AI.

The introduction of AI video The way to run they don’t have the typical Silicon Valley type. No Stanford founders, no Google founders, no nine people who bought them time to ignore money. Its three founders – two from Chile, one from Greece – met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and built the company in New York.

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

Over the past few years, the AI ​​industry has been working hard on the assumption that intelligence resides in language. Major languages ​​such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reflect this bet.

Runway, along with other competitors, is making another one. Its founders believe that the next generation of AI intelligence will not be built from words, but from videos and global models that learn how the world works, not how people explain it. That difference is understood as education. The results are not.

Runway co-founder and CEO Anastasis Germanidis said training models directly on real-world analytics is the next frontier of AI. The companies that arrive first, they argue, will not be the ones to develop the perfect language.

“We’re bound by our understanding of reality,” Germanidis told TechCrunch from Runway’s sun-drenched headquarters near Union Square.

“Linguistics are taught all over the Internet, on message boards and social networks, on books – disrupting the existing knowledge of humanity,” Germanidis continued. “But to get there, we need to use less data.”

Launched in 2018, Runway has made its mark video productions – including its latest Gen-4.5 devices – are AI tools that allow people to turn audio into dynamic, cinematic content.

Today, Runway’s technology creates jobs for filmmakers and advertising agencies, and the company has signed deals with major players like. Lionsgate and AMC Networks. His equipment has been used in films such as “Everything Everywhere at Once.”

Runway is now a luxury $5.3 billion and, according to one of its founders, added $40 million a year repeatedly in the second quarter of 2026.

If Runway’s bet that filmmaking is a path to international success pays off, the effects will be felt from Hollywood to drug discovery. If not, Runway is at risk of being overtaken by deep-pocketed competitors — Google chief among them.

Jumping

Over the past six months, the startup has put its plan into action and expanded beyond video production, launching the first example of the world in Decemberwith plans to launch another this year. (Global models are AI systems that accurately model locations to predict how they will behave.)

Runway isn’t alone in its quest to transform science-fiction videos into international genres, with long-running events in fun games, games, and robotics courses. Basics Bite and Labs Around the World it’s on a similar methodand Google has said it Genie world example same side.

Everyone is chasing the same brand: AI that solves the most difficult human problems. This is far from what Runway created, but it is the result of the technological possibilities and the innovators who had to follow where it led.

For his part, Germanidis sees real-world models as the foundation of science. The more information and observations you train on one model, the closer you get to the digital twin working in the universe – you can run experiments faster than any lab can. Most of the scientific activity is just waiting for results, he says. If you can force the wait, you can force yourself to move forward.

“If we can make scientists better than human scientists, we can accelerate progress in how we understand nature and how we solve problems,” Germanidis said.

A shot of the moon

Germanidis fell in love with programming at age 11 in Athens and came to the US at age 18 to study neuroscience and film. He returned to computer science, working at several Silicon Valley tech companies before deciding he had enough culture. Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuelaborn and raised in Santiago, studied economics as an undergraduate before working in film and then programming. Another native of Santiago, Chief Innovation Officer Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz studied business 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 “a technical school for engineers.”

The co-founders all wanted to stay film makers for other reasons in their lives, according to Matamala-Ortiz. So Runway started with a simple task: Can we use AI to design every filmmaker?

After releasing their first video version in February 2023 – that is unsurprisingly compared to what Runway is doing today – the goal became: Can we make everyone stay big filmmaker, according to Matamala-Ortiz.

It was necessary to develop the team to what it is today. The company has 155 employees spread across offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv, and most recently, Tokyo. “But along the way, we 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 said.

Things like robotics, drug discovery, and climate change — the kinds of problems that have frustrated researchers for years. Last year, Runway established a robotics division which Germanidis says has already led to real-world testing and deployment.

germanidis, like others, he sees the field entering training one model in many different ways – text, video, voice, and other sensors – I think that integration is the point.

Its mission is to showcase the technology of the Runway, given enough time and resources, and international models and anti-aging research.

Whether Runway can take the dominance of its videos into global models is yet to be determined, and the competition is far from over. Runway was among the first AI animations, but international fashion is a different genre with serious and respectable competitors. Google, already Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCunThe ‘godmother’ of AI Fei-Fei Liand the growing startup sector are all chasing the same goal.

Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of AI skills benchmarking company Work and a teacher at Stanford, he said that no one has proven to jump between videos of wisdom and common sense through world examples, but that does not mean that it is impossible. He added that if Runway wants to turn global betting into a reality, it will need to continue to raise funds – chief among them.

Runway is full of events CoreWeave and Nvidiabut they can’t confirm whether it has the potential to provide classification – the kind of reliable, large-scale computing that training models require.

“How do you make a basic model without clusters?” Katanforoosh asked. “I don’t think anyone would do that.”

Runway has raised $860 million to date, including a $315 million round in February from partners like AMD Ventures and Nvidia. This is in line with recent competitors, Luma AI and World Labs, which have raised $900 million and $1.29 billion respectively, according to PitchBook.

But Runway is also going up against incumbents like OpenAI, which has raised nearly $175 billion and CEO Sam Altmanand tech behemoth Google, whose parent company Alphabet is worth $4.86 trillion. Google is Runway’s biggest threat. The company’s Veo brand competes directly with Runway’s video production business, while its global Genie brand targets the segment Runway is running on.

Katanforoosh nodded to OpenAI, which closed his video platform Sora in March after burning approx $1 million per day accounting for funds that have at least $2.1 million according to other estimates. The bottom line: resources alone do not guarantee survival. They don’t prove it for Runway maybe.

Katanforoosh does not write Runway off. He pointed to the introduction of AI audio ElevenLabswho is winner OpenAI and Google on their benchmarks, although they lack resources and their parents. Runway, he argues, could follow the same playbook.

The comparison was not lost on the founders of Runway. Valenzuela says the Bay Area’s lack of “standardization” gives them an advantage. Not only do they have different opinions, they argue, but without Silicon Valley relationships, they would have to be stagnant, lacking the chest of many other people who have access to things that would prevent them from making quick money.

And according to Michelle Kwon, Runway’s chief operating officer, the company is in no rush to raise more capital, even as computing demands continue to increase.

“Their attitude has allowed them to be quick, to be right most of the time, and to create a culture that moves very quickly,” former investor Michael Dempsey, managing partner at Compound, told TechCrunch..

For Valenzuela, that culture starts with how he sees the world first. He spends every free time he has – not much, as a Co-CEO and a new father – reading books, including the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who describes him as the opposite of Pablo Neruda: illegal, uneducated, having the opinion that poetry is for people and not for laws.

“The rules are the rules they made,” Valenzuela said. “This is what drives us to do things at Runway. They say Silicon Valley is here and this is where the founders are. Why? This is just the rules.