After the transaction, investors valued the company at $1.5 billion.
Runway had previously raised $95 million, including a $50 million Series C in December. The company’s offices are in Bushwick, according to Pitchbook.
Generative AI companies that create software that allows you to create original works have not suffered as much from the funding slowdown as other tech companies, and venture capital investors aren’t the only ones pouring money into hot areas. .
The biggest tech companies are interested in AI startups for both products and sponsorships. AI products like ChatGPT use a lot of computing power, so cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft believe that selling cloud hosting services will be big business. The Information reported that Runway will rent cloud servers from Google as part of its latest investment.
Runway isn’t the only money Alphabet is pouring into AI. The company has invested nearly $400 million in Anthropic, which aims to build responsible AI tools. In return, Anthropic designated Google as its preferred cloud provider. Google Cloud has been working with Toronto-based Cohere since 2021 to incorporate machine learning tools into the process.
Microsoft has pledged $10 billion to OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT.
Hugging Face, another New York City company that offers a hub for open-source machine learning models, has partnered with Amazon’s AWS to make its tools and models available to machine learning developers, according to the company. announced in May. As part of the partnership, the company also chose his preferred cloud provider, this time AWS.
New York City-based generative AI companies have raised a cumulative $1.2 billion as of mid-March, according to PitchBook data. Over the past two years, investors have poured nearly $10 billion into the U.S. industry.
