World model race draws Runway, AMI Labs and DeepMind

Runway raised a $315 million Series E at a $5.3 billion valuation in February 2026, with funding led by General Atlantic and joined by Nvidia, Fidelity Management & Research, AllianceBernstein, Adobe Ventures, Mirae Asset, Felicis, Premji Invest, and AMD Ventures. The company plans to use the capital to pretrain its next generation of world models after releasing its first world model in December.

Yann LeCun left Meta in November 2025 and launched AMI Labs in March 2026 with a $1.03 billion seed round to develop JEPA-based world models for robotics and autonomous machines. Runway now faces competition from Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, which has raised roughly $1.2 billion, including a $1 billion round backed by Autodesk, Nvidia, and AMD, as well as Google DeepMind’s Genie research and Nvidia’s Cosmos world foundation models.

The move away from language-only systems changes the engineering requirements for AI teams. World models focus on physical dynamics, spatial relationships, and cause-and-effect, pushing evaluation toward physical realism, collision fidelity, long-horizon stability, simulated datasets, domain-randomized training, and closed-loop rollout testing.