Towards Universal Simulation agermanidis.com/writings/uni…

Complexity sounds better. Simplicity works better.

This May, Runway added more ARR than in all of 2025 combined. I spent the past few days visiting some of our largest customers in Europe. Enterprises across the region are rebuilding their workflows around generative video. The BBC used our real-time models to bring live AI avatars to broadcast TV. Salomon built their latest global campaign on Runway. The bottleneck is increasingly moving from production to direction. We started Runway when visual generative models were in their infancy, and it still feels so early.

Today we’re announcing London as Runway’s European HQ, and doubling down on our investment in the UK AI ecosystem. In under two years, our London team has become central to our research, including foundational work on GWM-1, our latest general world model. The caliber of talent and industry presence here makes it an ideal environment for the next chapter of Runway’s growth and for shaping the next generation of AI with world simulation. I’ll be in London for the week; DM me if you want to meet up!

Last chance to RSVP for our annual CVPR Friends Dinner in Denver on June 4th for conversation, cocktails and bites. RSVP at the link below.

Introducing Runway MCP. Now you can connect Runway directly into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit and more. Generate polished images and videos with state-of-the-art models, like Gen-4.5, Seedance 2.0, GPT Images 2.0, Kling and more. Right from where you're already working. Connect the MCP to your agent in seconds at the link below.

Less than a year ago, we introduced Aleph 1.0, with the thesis that video models can become as general as language models. It was the first model of its kind, moving beyond rigid tasks like text-to-video or image-to-video, to accept combinations of image, video, and text inputs and generalize to tasks unseen during training. Today, we're releasing Aleph 2.0, with the goal of making video editing models as powerful as possible for real-world use cases. It generates up to 30 seconds of video at 1080p and propagates edits consistently across shots. It preserves the details of the original video extremely well. Based on all the learnings from 1.0, we've gotten more opinionated about what the right interface for a video editing model looks like. You can now preview edits on a single frame before generating the entire video, which makes for a much more interactive and controllable editing experience. Hope you have as much fun with it as we've had these past weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: Runway is one of the most interesting inflection point stories in AI right now. Started as a tool for filmmakers. Now going after world models/ universe simulation, and by extension, everything from robotics to (one day) big bets such as anti-aging research. 🧵 Link👇

Agent was shaped by what we kept hearing from the most effective teams inside agencies and in-house brands using @runwayml every day. -A games studio went from 13 ads/week to ~100, going from idea to ad in under an hour, directly driving installs and revenue. -A professional services studio built a PowerPoint-to-video tool on our API, replicating $300-600K campaigns for ~$3K. -A global agency's pharma team built an AI animatic in Runway that outscored every ad in the client's history. We tried to capture how these teams actually work and make it the default in Agent.

Runway added more than $40M in net new ARR so far this quarter, and we're less than halfway through. The biggest growth period in the history of the company. Generative video has hit its inflection point. Enterprises like Amazon and Robinhood are using Runway daily to reshape how they tell stories and reach customers, on our frontier video and world models. Thank you to our team and our customers. The best is yet to come.

Talk to any Runway Character on the phone! It can see the phone's camera and answer your questions.

Excited to be partnering with great founders pushing the frontier of AI, whether that's research, infrastructure, applications, or entirely new kinds of media. If that's where you're building, we want to hear from you.

The idea that video models are too expensive to deploy does not make sense to me, and it usually comes from organizations that don’t understand the potential and surface area of the technology. If you believe, as I do, that video models are on the critical path to general intelligence, then it becomes a P0 problem to solve. It’s important to advance capabilities and efficiency at the same time. Improvements in efficiency help us deploy the models more widely and train them faster. People associate Runway with bringing new capabilities and control to video generation, but our work in making those models more efficient has been just as critical to getting them in front of tens of millions of users and 90% of the Fortune 100. We've invested in making video diffusion fast for a long time, bringing a distilled video model to market (Gen-3 Alpha Turbo) before anyone else. And we recently had to build an entirely new model serving stack from scratch to support real-time interactivity and instant generation as we start to deploy GWM-1 and our next world models. General, interactive world models will have a huge multiple of impact compared to traditional video models, and to get there you need a research organization that both understands how important those models are, and is insanely obsessive about getting the low-level details right. Here's a good place to contact such an organization: runwayml.com/careers

Three years ago, the beginning of the wild journey towards building a world simulator. A model that still holds a very special place in my heart. I feel the same sense of open possibility that I felt three years ago, now with real-time video.

Learn how to create your own Runway Character via the Runway API. And start bringing real-time video agents directly into your apps, products, websites and experiences. Get started at the link below.