Generative AI Startup Runway Raised $100 Million at $1 5 Billion Valuation

Overall, Runway is an interesting company to watch that may be poised to transform the art, entertainment, and human creativity industries in the years to come. Runway is a leading applied AI research company that is revolutionizing the art, entertainment, and human creativity industries. The company is dedicated to shaping the next era of these industries by leveraging Yakov Livshits the power of artificial intelligence and applying it to creative industries. “We do research on foundational AI models, we build the infrastructure to use those models and then we build applications,” Valenzuela said. Runway then helped build the original version of Stable Diffusion and is now implementing the tech into features for its design software.

For example, a user could upload a video of someone cycling through a park and ask the model to apply an aesthetic, theme, or filter. Some of the available options include claymation, paper and ink, watercolor art, paper origami, and charcoal sketch. Ian Sansavera, a software architect at a New York start-up called Runway AI, typed a short description of what he wanted to see in a video. Cade Metz has been writing about advances in artificial intelligence for more than a decade.

ChatGPT prompts

Originally, I wanted to create a short video in which I use some generative AI solution for every element, but in the end I only managed to realize this partly, I will explain later why. One of the film’s editors used Runway to help with effects on a few shots. The Series C extension — which values Runway at $1.5 billion, a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch — brings the company’s total raised to $237 million. It makes Runway one of the better-funded generative AI startups out there, in league with Cohere, Character.ai ($150 million) and Stability AI (~$100 million). The future of Runway AI is exciting, and we can expect to see even more innovative and advanced features in the coming years. Whether you’re a fashion designer, filmmaker, or architect, Runway AI has something to offer, and its potential is limited only by our imagination.

• Runway is a leading applied AI research company that is revolutionizing the art, entertainment, and human creativity industries.
• The festival also featured an expert panel to discuss the future of filmmaking more broadly, and this included award-winning filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.
• Stable Diffusion’s spin-off company, Runway, has released a new AI technology called Gen-1, capable of turning any video into a visually stunning masterpiece.
• With its user-friendly browser-based tool, anyone can get started with Runway AI and unleash their creative potential.
• While this isn’t a new feature per se, Runway has announced that they’ve refined their existing AI technology for improved video generation.
• Its tools are used by TikTokers, YouTubers, as well as mainstream movie and TV studios.

Its tools are used by TikTokers and YouTubers, as well as major film and television studios. The release of Gen-2 coincides with the unraveling of other text-to-video, AI-driven programs. Philipp Tsipman, the founder of generative AI video platform Camcorder AI, posted that in a span of seven days, five AI video generators showed up, including Runway’s Gen-2. The news signals how fast the teams behind the artificial intelligence industry want AI’s abilities to drastically improve. Based on the initial comments of those who have tried Gen-2 as soon as it went live, there seems to be a 3-second limit to the videos that Gen-2 can produce. Runway is yet to comment on this, but what the team has affirmed so far is that its AI tool is available to the public.

View All Heavy Industry & Manufacturing

If you ask for a dog with a cellphone in the park, it might give you a cellphone-wielding pup with an oddly human body. When someone describes an image for the system, it generates a list of features that the image might include. Then, a second neural network, called a diffusion model, creates the image and generates the pixels needed for the features. Last month, social media services were teeming with images of Pope Francis in a white Balenciaga puffer coat — surprisingly trendy attire for an 86-year-old pontiff. A 31-year-old construction worker from Chicago had created the viral sensation using a popular A.I.

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. We are continuing to see the rise of Generative AI, and in the near future we believe we will see full-feature films that are entirely generated. The characters, scores, b-roll, backgrounds, everything will be able to be generated with AI, and that will open the door for new creators who have important stories to tell. By using natural language as the engine for our powerful generative and editing tools, we’re leveling the playing field for current and emerging creatives, and saving them time and money at the same time.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Startup Behind Stable Diffusion Has Launched a Generative AI for Video

As these tools evolve, they can revolutionize how content is created, both in terms of cost and accessibility, opening the field to a wider array of creators. Welcome to a new era of video creation powered by artificial intelligence. Transforming text descriptions, images, and video clips into high-quality videos, Gen-2 is reshaping the landscape of digital content creation. Their idea, called « crazy » by many, was to build AI models that could power image and video editing and generation tools that would allow creators to generate full videos from mere text prompts. Stable Diffusion’s spin-off company, Runway, has released a new AI technology called Gen-1, capable of turning any video into a visually stunning masterpiece.

Gen-2’s features also include the ability to transfer the style of any image or prompt to every frame of your video (Stylization), and to turn mockups into fully stylized and animated renders (Storyboard). Users can also turn untextured renders into realistic outputs by applying an input image or prompt (Render). Gen-2 on the other hand, can generate videos instantly and in, ‘any style you can imagine using nothing but a text prompt.’ The company is working on three modes including Text to Video, Text + Image to Video and Image to Video. It has evolved into a brand-new creative suite that enables creators to complete tasks that are not achievable elsewhere. Artificial intelligence (AI) introduces automation at every scale, introducing radical changes in how we produce, from video-driven high-resolution animations to natural text production.

Just today, for example, plaintiffs filed suit against OpenAI, claiming the company used “stolen data” to “train and develop” its products including ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, DALL-E and VALL-E. And VentureBeat recently reported that Adobe Stock creators are unhappy with the company’s generative AI model Firefly. According to some creators, several of whom VentureBeat spoke to on the record, Adobe trained Firefly on their stock images without express notification or consent. The free version includes 125 credits per month, roughly translating to 25 seconds worth of generated video. It’s enough to check that it does what you want, but nothing you could professionally use. As reported by The Verge, a spokesperson for Runway says that it will be rolling out general access to users in the coming weeks, but that access is still limited for now.

With that said, Runway is set to leverage Google Cloud’s specialized generative AI tools for the development, acceleration and management of model deployment. They will tap into Google Cloud’s infrastructure and expertise in scaling AI and machine learning models, expanding the accessibility of GenAI-powered tools to a broader spectrum of creatives and businesses than ever before. Felicis is leading the new funding, the sources said, which comes on the heels of a boom in generative AI that has captured the public’s attention in recent months thanks to releases that also include OpenAI’s Dall-E and ChatGPT. Runway quickly emerged as one of the buzziest startups in the mix with its video editing software, for which the company has been releasing a bevy of generative AI features. For example, from a photo of a forest, a user can type a short text phrase into Runway’s software and instantly conjure a lake or a castle among the trees.

Of course, underneath those interfaces, there’s incredibly complex algorithms working together to produce the results you see. Midjourney churns out hyperrealistic AI images that can easily invite viewers into believing what they see is real. The text-to-image program cuts down the invested time in producing images by relying on the user’s written words. Yet the artificial intelligence industry may want to tap more into the system, to tweak and test it to awaken its full potential. I have long been curious about the text-to-video solution’s outcome in the generative AI field, where we generate video based on text instructions (prompts) with the help of artificial intelligence.