Cristobal Valenzuela

Under Valenzuela's leadership, Runway has grown steadily without layoffs. The company had 221 employees in Q4 2024 (up 52 YoY) and 285 employees by Q4 2025 (up 64 YoY), reaching 303 employees by March 2026. Runway raised $315M at a $5.3B valuation and has raised nearly $860M total. The company launched the Hundred Film Fund offering grants up to $1M to creators using AI tools. The AI Film Festival grew from a "scrappy misfit meetup" to a sold-out Lincoln Center event partnered with IMAX.

Valenzuela stated that AI regulation will "stifle" innovation and he won't "put the genie back in the bottle." On job losses, he told KCRW in September 2025 that while AI will lead to "some job losses," it will ultimately "be a boon to filmmakers," comparing current backlash to the arrival of sound in film. He regretted polarized AI discussions: "It's really hard to get nuanced conversations. We get into extremes. This is either destroying everything we know or it is the best thing we've ever seen." In October 2024, he wrote that "Runway is not an AI company. Runway is a media and entertainment company."

Internal documents leaked in July 2024 revealed Runway allegedly trained its models on thousands of scraped YouTube videos—including content from Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and creators like Casey Neistat and Marques Brownlee—without permission. The company faces artist lawsuits alleging copyright infringement. The Guild of America filed a complaint alleging training data included Guild-covered screenplays without authorization. The Directors Guild expressed "serious concerns." Runway has been "cagey about what data has been used to train its models," stating only that it used "a proprietary mixture of publicly-available and private data."