Saturday, 1 July 2023, Bengaluru, India
Runway, a firm developing generative AI tools for multimedia content makers, has announced a $141 million extension to its Series C round from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce, among others. This comes shortly after Inflection AI received a $1.3 billion investment.
Runway says it would use the fresh funding, which builds on the Series C it announced in December, to scale its internal research initiatives and increase the number of employees.
Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis established Runway in 2018. While attending NYU’s art program, Valenzuela met Matamala and Germanidis. The three quickly discovered that they were also interested in the artistic potential of AI. From there, Valenzuela, Matamala, and Germanidis began developing a set of artificial intelligence-powered tools targeted at filmmakers, photographers, and cinematographers.
Runway has steadily moved its attention to generative AI over the years, especially on the video side. Gen-2, an AI model that creates films from written instructions or an existing image, is the company’s current main product.
Of course, Runway has goals beyond creating a toolkit. Runway Studios is an entertainment subsidiary that the firm just established. It partners with corporate clients on productions. Additionally, it established the AI Film Festival, which according to Runway is among the first exhibitions of motion pictures made entirely or in part by artificial intelligence.
According to Valenzuela, Runway now has Fortune 500 and Global 2000 corporations as clients, including New Balance and “millions” of independent producers.
Given the tremendous excitement around all forms of generative AI, the burgeoning enterprise clientele is not surprising. A recent FreshBooks poll found that 25% of organizations are exploring generative AI tools and that 33% want to use generative AI for work in the coming year.
He continued, “Content creation today is very time and money-consuming. Given that businesses’ content requirements are continually growing, “We want to help bring those cost and time elements as near to zero as possible. Reimagining content production and developing the generative suite, a new kind of creative suite, are our main objectives.
The Series C extension raises the company’s total funding to $237 million and values Runway at $1.5 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. As a result, Runway joins Cohere, Character.ai ($150 million), and Stability AI ($100 million) as the better-funded generative AI startups.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
