Runway started by helping filmmakers - now it wants to beat Google at AI
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch
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 bought them time to ignore revenue. 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 also could be, depending on who you ask, one of the most consequential AI companies today. Not because of what it has built, but because of what it is trying to build next.
For the past several years, the AI industry has largely operated on the premise that intelligence lives in language. Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reflect that bet.
Runway, alongside other competitors, is making a different one. Its founders believe the next form of AI intelligence won’t be built from text, but from video and world models that learn how the world works, not just how humans 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 language.
“We’re basically bound by our own understanding of reality,” Germanidis told TechCrunch from Runway’s homey sunlight-filled headquarters near Union Square.
“Language models are trained on the entire internet, on message boards and social media, on textbooks — distilling the existing human knowledge,” Germanidis continued. “But to get beyond that, we need to leverage less biased data.”
Founded in 2018, Runway built its reputation on video-generation models — including its latest Gen-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 ad agencies, and the company has signed deals with major media players like Lionsgate and AMC Networks. Its tools have even been used in films such as “Everything Everywhere All 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 models pays off, the result will be felt from Hollywood to drug discovery. If it doesn’t, Runway risks being outpaced by competitors with far deeper pockets — Google chief among them.
