Runway has raised close to $860 million at a $5.3 billion valuation and is pushing beyond AI video generation into world models for gaming and robotics

Runway, a New York-based company, has raised close to $860 million at a $5.3 billion valuation. Its models compete with those from Google and OpenAI.

The company is expanding from AI-generated video into general world models—computational systems that simulate how environments evolve—with applications in gaming, robotics, and potentially closer to general intelligence.

Runway co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela stated that the real constraint on filmmaking has not been technology, and discussed how real-time video generation opens use cases beyond content creation, including what the company calls 'nonlinear media.'