Organisation
Runway
A New York company making generative video and image tools, and an early mover in putting text-to-video generation in front of the public.
Runway is a New York company that makes generative tools for video and images, and was one of the collaborators on the original Stable Diffusion model. It has been among the earliest to put text-to-video generation in front of the public: its Gen-2 model, released in 2023, produced short, rough clips that reviewers treated as more novelty than working tool, and successive versions have steadily narrowed the gap toward professional use. Its 2025 Gen-4 model focused on consistency — keeping the same character or location coherent across separate shots — which conventional filmmaking treats as a baseline requirement. Runway competes in a crowded field against OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo and a number of Chinese video generators, positioning itself around the production needs of film and advertising.
- Category
- Generative media
- Founded
- 2018
- HQ
- New York, US
- Funding
- ~$3bn valuation (2025 Series D)
- Key people
- Cristóbal Valenzuela
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Models & capabilities 4
- Money & business 1
Runway releases Gen-4
The model generates the same character, object or location across separate video shots from a single reference image, addressing consistency limits that had confined earlier AI video to short isolated clips.
Models & capabilities
Runway unveils Gen-3 Alpha
Trained jointly on video and images on new infrastructure, it added fine-grained temporal control and C2PA provenance labelling absent from Runway's Gen-2 model.
Models & capabilities
Pika Labs launches Pika 1.0, raises $55M
Founded by two Stanford computer-science PhD students, the video-editing app had already drawn some 500,000 users through its earlier Discord-only release.
Models & capabilities · Money & business
Runway launches Gen-2 text-to-video to the public
Clips were capped at four seconds and reviewers called the output 'more a novelty or toy than a genuinely useful tool,' citing melting objects and low framerates.
Models & capabilities