Overview Runway is a generative video and visual effects platform built by Runway ML, a New York based company founded in 2018 by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Anastasis Germanidis, and Alejandro Matamala. It is the tool that turned AI video from a research demo into a production workflow. Runway's team co authored the paper that led to Stable Diffusion, contributed to the underlying research for latent diffusion models, and shipped the first widely used text to video model (Gen 1) before OpenAI's Sora was publicly announced. In 2026, they remain the closest thing generative video has to a professional creative suite. Positioning wise, Runway is what you buy when you need a video tool, not just a video model. Sora produces higher fidelity clips in isolation; Runway lets you actually finish a project. The distinction matters. A working video creator's day is 20% generation and 80% everything else: masking, tracking, matching cuts, controlling camera motion, iterating on a shot, matching a reference style, replacing a background, extending a clip, syncing with a soundtrack. Runway ships all of that in one interface, with Gen 3 Alpha and its successors handling the generation itself. The customer base tells the story. Runway is used by post production teams at major studios, ad agencies, music video directors, and independent filmmakers. It was used to generate VFX shots in Everything Everywhere All at Once. It has been integrated into the workflows of production companies whose names you would recognize. This is not a Discord bot or a…