Runway, Luma Target Sales to Robotics Companies

Imax on Monday announced that it would screen the winning films from Runway’s AI-generated film festival at some of its theaters. Netflix recently said it had used AI to generate a scene in one of its shows for the first time: a building collapsing in The Eternaut, an Argentine sci-fi show. Both announcements show that video-generating AI software startups, such as Runway and Luma AI, are making inroads into Hollywood.

Now those startups are eyeing a more futuristic source of revenue: training robots. Both Runway and Luma AI are in talks with robotics and self-driving car companies that are interested in using the video models to improve their robots, according to executives for both companies.

Luma AI expects robotics to eventually be one of the largest sources of revenue for the company, CEO Amit Jain told me.

Likewise, Runway expects that generating video clips in real time, for robotics as well as video games, will eventually dwarf revenue from generating footage for a studio to later incorporate into a film, said the company’s co-founder and CTO Anastasis Germanidis. We previously reported that Runway hopes to hit $300 million in annualized revenue this year.