Runway started by helping filmmakers — now it wants to beat Google at AI

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.

Taking the leap

Within the last six months, the startup has put its plan into action and expanded beyond video generation, launching its first world model in December, with plans to launch another this year. (World models are AI systems that simulate environments well enough to predict how they’ll behave.)

Runway isn’t alone in its pursuit of turning physics-aware video models to world models, with near-term use cases in interactive entertainment, gaming, and robotics training. Startups Luma and World Labs are on a similar trajectory, and Google has pointed its Genie world model in the same direction.

Everyone is after some version of the same thing: AI that solves humanity’s hardest problems. That’s far from Runway’s original product, but it’s the result of both emergent capabilities in the technology and founders who were predisposed to follow where it led.

For his part, Germanidis sees world models as scientific infrastructure. The more sensory data and observations you train a single model on, the closer you get to a working digital twin of the universe — one you can run experiments on faster than any lab could. Much of the scientific process is just waiting on results, he points out. If you could compress that waiting, you could compress progress itself.

“If we can build a better scientist than human scientists, we can accelerate progress in how we understand the universe and how we solve problems,” Germanidis said.

The moonshot

Runway streetwear merch at the company's AI Summit in March 2026. Image Credits:Runway

Germanidis fell in love with programming as an 11-year-old in Athens and came to the U.S. at 18 to study neuroscience and film. He turned back to computer science, working at several Silicon Valley tech firms before deciding he’d had enough of the culture. Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela, born and raised in Santiago, studied economics as an undergraduate before working in film and then software. Another Santiago native, chief innovation officer Alejandro Matamala Ortiz studied advertising and ran a design firm.

The three met in 2016 while attending NYU’s ITP (Interactive Communications Program), a graduate program that Valenzuela described as an “art school for engineers.”

The co-founders had all aspired to be filmmakers at certain points in their lives, according to Matamala Ortiz. So Runway started with a simple mission: Can we use AI to make everyone a filmmaker?

According to Matamala Ortiz, after releasing their first video-generation model in