Runway secured a $315 million funding round at a $5.3 billion valuation to accelerate pre-training of world models and expand video AI across products and industries.

Industry watchpoints include access to models by peers, output quality at scale, responsible deployment, and provenance and watermarking standards as production scales.

The messaging emphasizes training video models at scale to become world models, echoing a view that predicting the next frame requires understanding how the world works.

Competition in world models is intensifying, with rivals like World Labs and Google DeepMind publicizing their models, highlighting a mix of open research and commercial strategies.

The latest model suite includes GWM-1 and versions focused on 3D avatars, all built on Gen-4.5, enabling robotics testing environments and neural network training.

The new capital will scale research, product development, and compute infrastructure, with a collaboration with CoreWeave to meet heavy compute needs.

Gen-4.5 improves rendering of physical phenomena like momentum and fluid dynamics, though it can exhibit occasional glitches such as frames where objects disappear and reappear.

Runway is shifting from its video-centric roots toward world models and simulations that capture physics and causal relationships for interactive environments.

The company, currently about 140 employees, plans to grow across research, engineering, and go-to-market, including expanding work with robotics and autonomous vehicles.

World models are envisioned as capable of perceiving and acting in the real world, with potential applications in robotics, medicine, climate, materials, and energy.

Runway’s core offerings center on generative video, with Gen-4.5 enhancing text and image input handling for more realistic, cinematic outputs.

Gen 4.5 enables high-definition video generation from prompts with native audio and multi-shot capabilities, while Runway also develops world models that generate 3D environments used by clients like Shutterstock and Robinhood.