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Generative AI startup Runway announced $308 million in a new round of funding, which the company said will fund expansion of its film and animation studio.
The Series D round of funding was led by General Atlantic with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank and other new and existing investors. That brings Runway to a total of $545 million raised to date, and gives it a valuation of about $3 billion.
New York-based Runway’s last publicly reported post-money valuation was $1.5 billion. Prior investors include Google and Salesforce Ventures.
“Today marks an important milestone as Runway announces a significant next step towards our goal of creating a new media ecosystem with world simulators,” CEO and co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela (pictured above) wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.
Runway recently launched Gen-4, its next-generation series of AI models for media generation and world consistency. According to Valenzuela, Gen-4 “enables precise generation of consistent characters, locations and objects across scenes.”
“These advancements aren’t merely incremental improvements; they form the foundation for an entirely new approach to media — an ecosystem built on AI systems that can simulate our world,” he wrote. “Our new funding will support these endeavors as we develop new AI research for new media,” adding that Runway is continuing to hire AI researchers and engineers.
Runway, founded in 2018, last year inked its first deal with a Hollywood studio: Lionsgate, company behind film franchises including John Wick and the Hunger Games. The pact centers around Runway’s creation and training of a new AI model, customized to Lionsgate’s proprietary portfolio of film and television content, which Lionsgate believes will help it cut pre- and post-production costs.
