The AI industry just got another indicator that the future lies beyond words alone.
On Tuesday, video AI firm Runway announced a $315 million Series E funding round. The funding slingshots the startup to a $5.3 billion post-money valuation, a source familiar with the matter told The Deep View. The round was led by General Atlantic, and included participation from investors such as Nvidia, Fidelity, Adobe and AMD.
New York-based Runway specializes in generative video, with its core offering being the Gen series of video models. In December, the company released Gen-4.5, its most recent iteration of the model capable of handling text and image inputs to produce realistic, cinematic videos with improved motion and prompt adherence compared to previous models.
However, with this funding round, Runway has its eyes on a new prize: World models.
- In the announcement, Runway said it intends to use the funding to “pre-train the next generation of world models and bring them to new products and industries.” The company called world models the “most transformative technology of our time.”
- It follows a December blog post from the company entitled “Universal World Simulator,” detailing its vision to train video models at such a large scale that they become world models. “To predict the next frame, a video model must learn how the world works,” Runway wrote.
Runway’s interest mirrors a broader industry shift towards AI that can work with more than just text. World Labs and AMI Labs, founded by AI godparents Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun, are each in talks for funding at multibillion-dollar valuations to build their models. Meanwhile, Google’s Genie world model is already being put to use by Waymo to train for rare encounters.
The industry is betting on world models, capable of perceiving and acting on the world, as physical applications of AI become more and more tangible. These models could help robotics systems understand physics, which is crucial for scaling physical AI safely.
“The hardest problems facing humanity are rooted in physical reality,” Runway wrote in its blog post. “Robotics, medicine, climate, materials, energy. Language models will not get us there.”