Runway is a private AI company in New York that builds video generation and world models. Founded in 2018 by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz and Anastasis Germanidis, it was valued at $5.3 billion in February 2026 and reported $200 million ARR in September 2026.
From an NYU project to a world model lab
The founders met at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and launched Runway as a no-code way for artists to run machine learning models. Seeing filmmakers use it mostly for rotoscoping and inpainting, the team focused on video. Runway researchers co-authored the 2021 latent diffusion paper behind Stable Diffusion, and the company shipped Gen-1 and Gen-2 in 2023, Gen-3 Alpha and Act-One in 2024, and Gen-4, Gen-4.5 and the GWM-1 world model family in 2025.
How Runway makes money
- Creator subscriptions with generation credits
- Per-seat enterprise plans for studios, agencies and brands
- Usage-based API access through Runway Dev
- Direct model licensing to its largest customers
Germanidis said ARR rose from about $100 million in April 2026 to $200 million in September 2026, and that Runway serves more than 60 million creators and 95% of the Fortune 100.
Funding and ownership
Runway raised a $141M Series C extension at $1.5B in 2023, a $308M Series D at just over $3B in April 2025, and a $315M Series E at $5.3B in February 2026. General Atlantic led the Series E, joined by NVIDIA, Fidelity, AllianceBernstein, Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, Felicis, Mirae Asset, Emphatic Capital and Premji Invest. Earlier backers include Google, Salesforce Ventures and Amplify Partners.
Leadership
Valenzuela and Germanidis are co-CEOs; Germanidis took the title in 2026. Kamil Sindi is CTO and Anthony Maggio is CPO. The company had about 140 employees in February 2026 and opened a Paris research office in 2026.
Competitors
Runway competes with OpenAI's Sora, Google DeepMind's Veo and Genie, Kuaishou's Kling, Luma AI, Pika, Adobe Firefly and World Labs. Its Gen-4.5 model ranked first on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard in late 2025.
What's next
Runway says it will use Series E money to pre-train its next world models and take them into gaming, robotics and other industries. The Kinetix team, which joined in September 2026, is focused on robotics.
