Names, versions and owners change fast. Checked October 2026.
In plain words
Runway is a company and a creative app, not a chatbot. It is used by filmmakers, advertisers and video creators to make new footage or change existing footage with AI, in a web browser.
Its best-known tools are text-to-video models called Gen, short for generation. You type a description such as "slow pan across a rain-soaked market at night", or upload a still image, and the model produces a few seconds of video. Other tools edit real footage, adding or removing objects or changing the lighting, or animate a character from a video of an actor's performance.
Runway was founded in 2018 in New York by three classmates from a creative technology course at New York University. It trains its own models, and its research now also covers "world models" that simulate how scenes move and react.
Everyday example
A film crew in a box
Shooting a short ad for a chai brand normally means a location, a camera team, lights and a day of filming. With Runway you describe the scene, steam rising from a cup at sunrise on a terrace, and get a draft clip in minutes. If the light looks wrong, you ask for it warmer. It works like a tiny crew that can reshoot on request.
Where the example breaks: A real crew controls every detail and repeats a shot exactly. Generated clips can drift between takes, bend physics or hands, and still need a human eye before they are usable.
Latestas of October 2026
- Main video model
- Gen-4.5, released 1 December 2025
- Other tools
- Aleph 2.0 for editing footage, Act-Two for animating characters, and Runway Characters, real-time talking video from one image (July 2026)
- Research
- World models, including GWM Worlds 2, a real-time interactive simulation preview, on 3 September 2026
These details change often. The rest of this page explains what it is, which stays true.
How it actually works
Video generation extends the ideas behind AI image makers to moving pictures.
From noise to frames
Video generators of this kind are usually built as a diffusion model: start from random noise and remove it step by step, guided by your prompt, working on many frames at once so the motion stays smooth.
Working in a compressed space
Raw video is huge, so models like these work in a compressed latent space and decode back to pixels at the end. This keeps generation fast enough for a creative tool.
Starting from a picture
Many users give a still image as the first frame, which fixes the look of a character or product, then describe the motion. This is image-to-video, and it helps keep a scene consistent across shots.
Toward world models
Runway describes its longer-term research as "general world models": systems that learn how the world looks and behaves so they can simulate scenes interactively, not just render a fixed clip. See generative AI.
- Company
- Runway AI, Inc., founded in 2018 in New York by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis
- Early text-to-video model
- Gen-2, described by Runway in 2023 as able to make videos from text, images or clips
- Editing tools
- Aleph (July 2025) edits existing video; Act-One (October 2024) animates characters from an actor's video and voice
- Stated mission
- "We are building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science."
Other video generators include Google's Veo and models from Chinese labs. OpenAI's Sora was one too, until it closed in 2026.
Questions people ask
Who founded Runway?
Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis, who met as students at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. They started the company in New York in 2018.
Is Runway the same as Sora?
No. Both turn text into video, but they come from different companies. Runway is an independent company focused on creative tools. Sora was OpenAI's video model and app, which OpenAI shut down in 2026.
Can Runway make long videos or full films?
Each generation is a short clip, usually a few seconds. People make longer pieces by generating many clips and editing them together, much like shooting and cutting scenes. Keeping characters consistent across clips still takes care.
Who uses Runway?
Filmmakers, advertising teams, music video makers, designers and social media creators, mostly for short clips, visual effects, quick drafts of a scene before filming, and editing footage they already have.