Runway AI, Inc. (also known as Runway and RunwayML) is an American company based in New York City that develops generative artificial intelligence research, models, and products for video, image, and multimedia generation.[1] It is most notable for co-creating the popular image generation AI systems Stable Diffusion [2][3]and developing the first commercial text-to-video generation AI models Gen-1 and Gen-2.[4][5]
The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela[6], Alejandro Matamala, and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP[7]. The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.
On December 2020, Runway raised US$8.5 million[8] in a Series A funding round.
In August of 2022, the company co-released an improved version of their Latent Diffusion model called Stable Diffusion together with the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a compute donation by Stability AI.[9][10]
On September, 2022, the company raised US$35 millions in a Series B funding round.
In February of 2023 Runway released Gen-1 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model[11][12][13] accessible via a simple web interface.
On December 21, 2022 Runway raised U$50 million[14] in a Series C round. Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round in June of 2023 at a $1.5 billion valuation[15][16] from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce[17] to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video content[18].[19]
Stable Diffusion is an open-source deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on the original paper High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models published by Runway and the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.[20][21][22] Stable Diffusion is mostly used to create images conditioned on text descriptions.