Runway Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding

At the start of the year, Microsoft bought a stake in the latter startup for a sum reported to be $10 billion. As part of the deal, OpenAI received access to a significant amount of Azure cloud infrastructure. Google is said to have made the investment as Yakov Livshits part of a $100 million funding round that Runway recently raised. The round was first reported last month by Insider, which cited sources as saying that the capital came from a “top cloud provider.” The report didn’t name the cloud provider in question.

Anyone who wants to try the tool out will need to sign up through the company’s Discord. While text-to-image AI tools such as Midjourney and Dall-E advance and become more and more perfected, Runway‘s recently launched text-to-video AI tool, Gen-2, appears to be the logical progression in Gen-AI technology. The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Runway uses a combination of AI and human moderation to prevent users from generating videos that include pornographic or violent content or violate copyrights.

runway generative AI tool ‘gen-2’ makes realistic movies with just words

Runway, one of the hottest generative AI startups with its text-to-image video tools, has announced a fresh round of funding, adding $141 million in a series C from Google, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, among other investors. “By partnering with Google Cloud, we’re able to further our efforts to build a better creative future that’s increasingly accessible, controllable, and empowering for artists and creators alike.” The startup recently founded Runway Studios, an entertainment division that serves as a production partner for enterprise clients. It also launched the AI Film Festival, an event Runway claims is one of the first dedicated to showcasing films produced in whole or in part by AI. Today marks a significant milestone in the world of generative AI funding. Runway, a company that develops generative AI tools for multimedia creators, announced a $141 million extension to its Series C funding round, following close on the heels of Inflection AI’s substantial investment.

These systems have the capacity to comprehend and generate content across diverse modalities, including text, images, audio and video. This research is pivotal in enabling AI to be more versatile and adaptable, opening up new avenues for creative applications. Gen-1 allows users to transform existing video footage, input a rough 3D animation or shaky smartphone clip and apply an AI-generated overlay.

Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology

The emergence of text-to-video AI programs like Gen-2 allows general users to create video content without relying heavily on the complex settings of movie making. Gen-2 doubles as a video-ready production tool that realistically and consistently synthesizes new videos. ‘It’s like filming something new, without filming anything at all,’ says Runway. In one of its video models, Runway types ‘the late afternoon sun peeking through the window of a New York City loft’ and puts together a scenic view of the city from the window inside a plant-covered apartment.

• And so, we started building tools and conducting research for storytellers to interact with this emerging technology.
• Many great stories, whether told through the written word or on the silver screen, share a common thread—a hero’s journey.
• For instance, in 2019, Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI was split between cash and credits for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, the MIT Tech Review reported in 2020.
• We’re on the precipice of a massive shift when it comes to content creation that is empowering for creatives around the world.
• In 2020, Microsoft detailed that it had built an Azure-powered supercomputer for OpenAI with 10,000 graphics cards and 285,000 central processing unit cores.

And now, AI startup Runway Research has announced a new AI video generation model that’s set to make text-to-video mainstream, with its Gen-2 offering. It is a full-stack applied research company that builds generative AI models and develops infrastructure to deploy those models to production. Runway AI is designed for anyone who wants to create and edit videos, regardless of their level of technical expertise. From amateur TikTokers and YouTubers to professional movie and TV studios, Runway AI’s tools can be used by anyone with anything to say.

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.

Current capabilities lag behind this dream, but for those tracking the tech’s progress, an announcement today by AI startup Runway of a new AI video generation model is noteworthy nonetheless. Runway AI’s text-to-image capabilities are also noteworthy, as they allow users to Yakov Livshits create images from text. For example, a user could input the word “tree” into the platform, and Runway AI could generate an image of a tree. This technology can be used to create custom graphics quickly and efficiently, and can be especially useful for graphic designers.

In the future, we can expect to see even more advanced capabilities, such as the ability to create interactive media and more realistic simulations. For the time being, filmmakers, animators, CGI artists, and ethicists can rest easy. The technology will likely need several more iterations before it comes close to generating film-quality footage, if it ever does​. Runway’s Gen-2, an AI model, generates videos from text, despite limitations.

Jobs at Runway

We’re on the precipice of a massive shift when it comes to content creation that is empowering for creatives around the world. New technologies like generative AI are allowing more diverse stories to be told and opening the door to possibilities that artists could only dream of in the past. These tools are ushering in the next generation of artistic expression, which will be highly democratized and accessible. “Deep neural networks for image and video synthesis are becoming increasingly precise, realistic, and controllable.

The Pro plan costs $28 per user per month (billed annually as $336) and includes 2250 credits per month, which equates to 450 seconds of Gen-2. For larger teams and organizations that need a custom, secure, and robust flexibility at scale, there is the Enterprise plan, for which you would need to contact Runway for pricing. Investors recently told Insider that they were big fans of buzzy photo and video generative AI startup Runway. The world of Generative AI reaches another milestone with RunwayML‘s release of Gen-2, a multi-modal AI system capable of creating novel videos from text, images, or video clips. This funding round brings the company’s total funding to $95.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Runway plans to use the fresh funds to develop new tools, particularly around audiovisual applications.

Gen-2 costs 5 credits per second of video generation, with 1 credit being equal to $.01​. At this stage, Gen-2 is more of a novelty or toy than a genuinely useful tool in a video workflow. While its output can potentially be edited into something more coherent, this would likely require significant work, possibly even more than shooting the footage in the first place​. However, the model does show promise in understanding a range of styles, like anime and claymation, that can be adapted to the lower framerate​.

/ Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily. In other words, all we have to judge Gen-2 right now is a demo reel and a handful of clips (most of which were already being advertised as part of Gen-1). A new window will open, featuring a large text box where you can describe the video you wish to create. A diverse Yakov Livshits digital database that acts as a valuable guide in gaining insight and information about a product directly from the manufacturer, and serves as a rich reference point in developing a project or scheme. It’s worth paying attention to its development, as I anticipate it will be capable of remarkable achievements within 1-2 years as the technology refines.