At a valuation of $ 1.5 Billion, Runway is touted to be the subsequent part of generative AI video innovation. Dubbed “Gen-2”, Runway’s newest launch is an AI text-to-video mannequin that creates movies utilizing pre-existing photographs and textual content prompts. Gen-2 is the follow-up to its predecessor Gen-1 which was launched in February. One of many world leaders in synthetic intelligence computing and software program, Nvidia (who additionally noticed rising inventory market costs) contributed to the $141 Million sum subsequent to Google and Salesforce.
Based by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis in 2018, Runway was created to democratise machine studying whereas encouraging its use within the inventive trade, notably with filmmakers, photographers and cinematographers. An accompanying cellular app was launched earlier this yr, giving Runway customers entry to its generative AI software program.
A buyer base comprising Fortune 500 and World 2000 firms alongside legions of particular person creators exhibits the importance of AI as a instrument for content material creation for companies. The founders of Runway goal to reimagine content material creation and construct a “new sort of inventive, generative suite”. The success and progress of ChatGPT and AI sees each huge know-how firms and enterprise capital companies keen to take a position billions into burgeoning startups which might be working with groundbreaking know-how.
Founder Valenzuela has acknowledged that, “Content material creation at present may be very costly and time-consuming. We wish to assist convey these price and time components as near zero as doable, particularly as firms’ content material wants are solely growing.” What’s the way forward for Runway? Nicely, the corporate not too long ago launched the AI Movie Pageant, an occasion that, as experiences say is “devoted to showcasing movies produced in entire or partly by AI”. With this new money injection, solely time will inform if Runway and different AI startups will be capable of placate skeptics.
Skeptics apart, in keeping with Reuters experiences, Inflection (one other comparable generative AI software) raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft at a valuation of $4 billion whereas Typeface additionally raised a hefty funding of $100 million (in Sequence B of funding), with the latter having solely launched in February this yr. 2023 appears to be the yr of technological innovation with generative AI persevering with to form how we produce tales and concepts, bringing creativeness into the tangible.
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