AI Gold Rush: Runway earns $141 million for improving its technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) startups continue to attract investor interest, raising massive amounts of capital.

In a recent example, Runway AI Inc. An emerging AI video company known for its technology that can create a short movie from a few lines of text. A financing round of $141 million. It was led by tech giants such as Google and Nvidia Corp.’s Alphabet Inc. , as well as Salesforce Inc. , among others.

This latest capital infusion builds on Runway’s previous $50 million Series C funding round led by Felicis Ventures in December. Since its founding in 2018, this New York startup specializing in AI-powered filmmaking and editing tools has raised nearly $237 million in funding.

said Runway co-founder and CEO Cris Valenzuela bloomberg The latest funding will spur further research into the models the company uses to generate video and images. He noted that improving the consistency and controllability of model building was a key focus for the team. The company’s latest product, the Runway ML Gen-2, is a case in point, producing short, silent videos in response to written text.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hailed Runway technology as a potential game changer in the way artists create and tell stories. He cited generative AI as a revolutionary force in the content creation industry, bringing new ideas and narratives.

Investors are flaunting their money in AI startups, taking advantage of the global interest in the field. Generative AI, a subclass of technology that can produce new content such as images or poetry from simple typed vectors, is particularly attractive, especially after the advent of tools like ChatGPT (text generation) and MidJourney (image generation).

Despite the proliferation of chatbots and image generators, the potential for AI in video creation is still in its infancy.

In the midst of all these developments, Inflection AI, better known as the Pi chatbot, has announced a staggering $1.3 billion in funding. This increases the estimated valuation of Inflection AI to around $4 billion. This project is backed by tech giants like Microsoft and Nvidia, and industry veterans like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The investments come amid estimates that the generative AI category alone could add up to $1.4 trillion to the economy annually.