Runway is pushing its AI world models into robotics and self-driving cars. The New York company spent seven years on video and photo generation AI, including its Gen-4 video model in March and Runway Aleph for video editing in July. Now robotics firms are knocking, eager to use Runway’s tech for training simulations.
The pitch: real-world robot training is slow, costly, and hard to scale. Runway’s simulated world models offer a scalable alternative, letting companies test precise variables repeatedly without changing other factors.
Anastasis Germanidis, Runway’s co-founder and CTO, explained the shift wasn’t planned. Robotics and other sectors reached out after seeing Runway’s increasingly realistic models. 
Germanidis said:
“We think that this ability to simulate the world is broadly useful beyond entertainment, even though entertainment is an ever increasing and big area for us.”
“It makes it much more scalable and cost effective to train [robotic] policies that interact with the real world whether that’s in robotics or in self driving.”
“You can take a step back and then simulate the effect of different actions. If the car took this turn over this, or perform this action, what will be the outcome of that? Creating those rollouts from the same context, is a really difficult thing to do in the physical world, to basically keep all the other aspects of the environment the same and only test the effect of the specific action you want to take.”
Runway won’t build separate models for robotics or autonomous driving. Instead, it plans to fine-tune existing world models and is creating a dedicated robotics team. The company has raised over $500 million from Nvidia, Google, and General Atlantic, hitting a $3 billion valuation.
This move follows Nvidia’s recent update to its Cosmos world models and robot training tech.
Germanidis summed up the vision:
“The way we think of the company, is really built on a principle, rather than being on the market. That principle is this idea of simulation, of being able to build a better and better representation of the world. Once you have those really powerful models, then you can use them for a wide variety of different markets, a variety of different industries.”
Runway’s tech is shifting gear—simulating real worlds for robots to learn faster and cheaper. The robotics world is watching closely.
