Google is investing in Runway, a New York–based startup that lets customers generate video from text descriptions using artificial intelligence it pioneered, at a valuation of around $1.5 billion including the new capital, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The investment, part of a roughly $100 million funding round, underscores the fierce competition among cloud providers to get close to companies with cutting-edge AI services that could become major cloud customers or acquisition targets in the future. Amazon Web Services has touted Runway, which generates relatively little revenue from its video-editing tools, as a key AI-startup customer but Runway is now expected to rent cloud servers from Google, said one person briefed about the deal.
