The company Runway AI, which produces software for artificial intelligence, with which you can create short videos based on a minimal verbal request, announced the raising of investment funds in the amount of $141 million.
The receipt of this financing is a kind of continuation of the December round of raising Series C investments under the leadership of Felicis Ventures, which result is providing the firm with $50 million.
As of now, the company has raised about $237 million over the entire period of its existence. The firm has been producing video-making tools based on artificial intelligence since 2018.
Runway is currently in the front row of beneficiaries from the global interest in AI. In 2023, many investors have directed billions of dollars of funding for the development of companies that work in the field of artificial intelligence. In this case, funding sources give preference to startups associated with generative AI, with the help of which written prompts are transformed into the content. While most companies are busy creating chatbots with artificial intelligence and image generators, activities such as the development of artificial intelligence tools for videos remain on the sidelines, waiting for a surge of interest.
Runway fills the gap in video generation using AI. After receiving the next financing, the company’s value reached $1.5 billion. This information is reported by the media with a link to the source that is aware of the financial performance of the company and shared the relevant data, using the right to confidentiality. Back in December, the firm’s value was $500 million.
Cris Valenzuela, co-founder, and CEO of Runway, said during a conversation with media representatives that the company intends to use the funds raised as a financial base to support research in the field of artificial intelligence in the context of applicating advanced technology as a tool for creating images and video materials.
It is more difficult to create a video based on a written request than to carry out the image generation procedure, which is available in AI systems from OpenAI, Stability AI, and Midjourney. In this case, it is necessary to take into account the laws of physics, even in the miniature space of a separate piece of virtual reality, and train an artificial intelligence model to do this.
Cris Valenzuela says that the issue of consistency is of fundamental importance for the company, which in this case should be interpreted as consistency between generations. He also noted that another important task is to improve the controllability of artificial intelligence models.
The newest Runway product is Gen-2. This is an artificial intelligence model that can generate a short video clip without sound in response to a written request. This AI configuration can be downloaded via the iOS app and on the Discord channel.
The company also produces web-based editing tools for filmmakers. The firm helped create the original version of the AI Stable Diffusion text-to-image conversion model.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says that Runway technology can change the content of artists’ work and how they tell stories. According to him, artificial intelligence breathes new life into stories and ideas that used to be something that could not even be imagined.
As we have reported earlier, Inflection AI Raises $1.3 Billion.
