Runway, the New York start-up best known for its AI-powered video and image generation tools, is broadening its horizons beyond entertainment. After seven years of building creative industry tools, the company now sees major potential for its world-simulating models in robotics and autonomous driving.
Runway’s technology, which powers products like its Gen-4 video generator and Aleph video editor, has caught the attention of robotics and self-driving firms. According to co-founder and CTO Anastasis Germanidis, these companies are using Runway’s models to create training simulations that would be expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to replicate in the real world.
“We think this ability to simulate the world is broadly useful beyond entertainment,” Germanidis told TechCrunch. “It makes it much more scalable and cost effective to train robotic policies that interact with the real world.”
By running simulations, companies can test specific scenarios, like how a self-driving car would react to different turns, without altering all the other conditions around it, something nearly impossible in live testing.
Runway isn’t alone in this space; Nvidia recently launched updated world models for similar purposes. But instead of creating a completely new product line, Runway plans to fine-tune its existing AI models and build a dedicated robotics team.
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The pivot has strong investor backing. With over $500 million raised from supporters like Nvidia, Google, and General Atlantic, Runway now holds a $3 billion valuation. Germanidis said the company’s guiding principle remains the same: building increasingly accurate simulations of the world, which can then unlock opportunities across multiple industries.
“Once you have really powerful models,” he said, “you can use them for a wide variety of markets, and we’re just starting to see how far that can go.”
