Runway AI, a company that develops applications for video generation using artificial intelligence (AI), has made a new round of funding for a total of $141 millionwith Google, Nvidia and Salesforce serving as anchor investors.
This funding round is an extension of the company’s $50 million Series C round last December, led by Felicis Adventures. to date, Runway raised $236.5 million in six rounds of fundingaccording to information from Crunchbase.
Runway was founded in 2018 by students from New York University. It was officially released to the market in 2019 as a template guide that has enabled others to implement and run open source machine learning models for a variety of use cases. The company has specialized in video editing tools that support machine learning, text-to-image, video-to-video, and text-to-video conversion.
Salesforce also highlights that the company provides a complete platform from form search to end-user-oriented applications, which has identified its participation in this funding process.
The latest deal listed on Runway values start It is based in New York and is priced at $1.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. In December, the company was valued at $500 million.
In a statement announcing the investment, Salesforce explained that the latest successes of the Runway research team are two video generation models, Structure-guided video installation And content with diffusion modelsalso known as Gen 1 (Video to Video), released March 2023, and Gen-2 (Text/Image/Video to Video), released early June, based on Gen-1.
According to the company, Gen 2 It is the only commercially available multimedia AI system that has text-to-video capability Today: Users can write text prompts and create video montages in any style.
Runway co-founder and CEO Chris Valenzuela said the company plans to use the money to conduct additional research on AI models for image and video generation, according to Bloomberg.
The director noted the difficulties of generating video from simple text instructions. Unlike creating an image by AI, The video must take into account aspects such as motion, the laws of physics, and other details When asked to create a “waves crashing on the beach at sunset” video.
“In today’s world, video has by and large become one of the most popular forms of digital content that is consumed globally, and everyone can be a creator. As other approaches see AI’s generative capabilities leak, video must be updated too. Runway’s approach to putting AI in the hands of All creators is a very exciting undertaking and we’re proud to support it,” added Salesforce.
“Beer enthusiast. Subtly charming alcohol junkie. Wannabe internet buff. Typical pop culture lover.”