[9] The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela,[10] Alejandro Matamala and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP.

[11] The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.

Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round in June 2023 at a $1.5 billion valuation[17][18] from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce[19] to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video production.

[20][21] In February 2023 Runway released Gen-1 and Gen-2 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model[22][23][24] accessible via a simple web interface.

The company focuses on developing proprietary foundational model technology that professionals in filmmaking, post-production, advertising, editing, and visual effects can utilize.

A former Runway employee alleged to 404 Media that a company-wide effort was to compile videos into spreadsheets, which was then downloaded using youtube-dl through proxy servers to avoid being blocked by YouTube.