Runway: From Visual Creativity to Leading Robotics and Self-Driving Cars

Runway, Inc.: Over the past seven years, has dedicated its efforts to developing advanced tools for generating innovative visual content for the creative industries. Now, the company is moving to explore a new opportunity for its pioneering technologies within the robotics and self-driving car sectors.

Runway's Advanced Models and Reality Simulation

New York-based Runway: is renowned for its global AI models that produce realistic videos and images, models that are increasingly learning to simulate the real world. The company recently launched Gen-4, its advanced video generation model, in March, followed by Runway Aleph for video editing in July. As Runway's models improve and their ability to simulate the laws of physics through observing 2D video, they become more efficient at simulating reality, which is attracting the interest of robotics and self-driving car companies. (Semafor, 2025)

Motivations for Expansion into Robotics and Autonomous Driving

Anastasios Germanidis: Co-founder and CTO of Runway, stated that the company's global models have become more realistic, leading to increased interest from robotics and self-driving car companies to utilize this advanced technology. Germanidis added: "We believe that this world-simulation capability is broadly useful beyond the entertainment industry, although entertainment is a growing and large field for us." He noted that this technology enhances the scalability and cost-effectiveness of training robotic policies that interact with the real world, both in robotics and autonomous driving. Simulation is considered a key point for solving challenges in robotics and autonomous driving. (Semafor, 2025)

Runway's Applications in Robotics Training

Germanidis explained: that collaboration with robotics and self-driving car companies was not part of Runway's initial vision when it launched in 2018. However, the company realized the broader scope of its models' applications after being contacted by companies from these and other industries. Runway's technology is currently used in robotic training simulations, which include complex physics-based simulations such as simulating fluids, fire, smoke, hair, and fabric movement, providing realistic training environments. (RunwayML, 2024)

Germanidis added: that training robots and self-driving cars in real-world scenarios is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. Although Runway recognizes that it will not replace real-world training in any way, Germanidis affirmed that companies can achieve significant value from running simulations on Runway's models due to their ability to be highly accurate. Unlike real-world training, these models make it easy to test specific variables and situations, such as changing a car's path or executing a particular action, without changing anything else in the scenario, providing high control and accuracy.

"You can take a step back: and then simulate the effect of different actions," he said. "If the car took this turn instead of that, or performed this action, what would be the result? Generating these predictions from the same context is extremely difficult in the physical world, where it is hard to keep all other aspects of the environment constant and test only the effect of the specific action you want to take."

Future Prospects and Investment Support

Runway is not the only company: striving to address this challenge. For instance, Nvidia launched the latest version of its world models, Cosmos, along with other infrastructure for robotics training, earlier this month.

The company does not expect: to launch a "completely separate line of models" for its clients in the robotics and self-driving car industries. Instead, Runway will optimize its current models to better serve these industries. The company is also building a dedicated robotics team to bolster this expansion.

Germanidis added: that while these industries were not part of the company's initial offerings to investors, they support this strategic expansion. Runway has raised over $500 million from prominent investors such as Nvidia, Google, and General Atlantic, at a valuation of $3 billion.

"The way we think about the company: is really built on a principle, rather than a market focus," Germanidis explained. "That principle is the idea of simulation, the ability to build a better and better representation of the world. And once you have these really powerful models, you can use them for a wide range of different markets, a wide variety of different industries. And the industries that we expect are already out there, and they'll change even more as a result of the power of generative models."