With a diverse blend of artistic, design, and technical backgrounds, the founders of Runway — Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis, set out to bridge the gap between art and technology. Their shared vision was to democratize access to advanced AI tools and empower creators to work with machine learning in intuitive, visual ways. Runway was born out of a collaboration at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts ITP program, grounded in a shared passion for creativity and a bold vision to redefine digital storytelling. At its heart, the company blends cutting-edge artificial intelligence with intuitive design, empowering artists, filmmakers, and creators to bring their ideas to life seamlessly, imaginatively, and without technical barriers.
From Pixels to Possibilities
The company was launched in 2019 as a model directory that allowed users to deploy and run open-source models for various artistic use cases. As the user base expanded over the years, the startup shifted its focus towards developing ML-based video editing tools. The founders had initially intended to be open to how users might utilize their platform.
Runway’s advanced AI image and video tools allow you to explore ideas in near real-time, closing the gap between idea and execution. Gen-2, one of the world's first publicly available text-to-video models, is at the forefront of Runway’s innovation. This AI-powered tool lets users generate realistic videos in seconds, simply by entering a text prompt. For example, "a surreal dreamscape with floating islands at sunset.” Unlike traditional animation or CGI, which require specialized teams and tools, Gen-2 uses AI-generated imagery and motion to create videos entirely from scratch. It’s a mode of storytelling by typing.
