Runway

Runway was founded in New York in 2018 by Chilean-born Cristóbal Valenzuela with Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis, classmates from NYU’s ITP program who wanted to put machine learning in artists’ hands. The company co-authored the latent-diffusion research behind Stable Diffusion, then defined the AI-video category with its Gen series of models, reaching a multibillion-dollar valuation on the thesis that generative models are a new kind of camera.

Courting Hollywood instead of fighting it

Runway’s tools crossed into legitimacy early: its AI rotoscoping was used by the visual-effects team behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and since 2023 its annual AI Film Festival has given machine-made cinema a red carpet in New York and Los Angeles. In September 2024 it signed the first major studio deal of the generative era, building a custom model trained on Lionsgate’s film catalog; by 2026 Lionsgate had taken an equity stake and announced co-developed, AI-generated series drawing on its franchises.

The company sits squarely on the fault line of Hollywood’s AI fight. It is a defendant alongside Stability AI and Midjourney in the artists’ copyright class action brought by Karla Ortiz and others, and a 404 Media report surfaced an internal spreadsheet suggesting training data scraped from YouTube channels — allegations that shadow its artist-friendly branding. Unions and filmmakers have also warned that “pre-visualization” quietly becomes replacement.

Valenzuela’s consistent answer is that Runway is a tool-maker in the lineage of the camera — that studios serious about AI treat it as a creative resource, and that new art forms, not fewer artists, are the endgame.