Runway picks London for its European headquarters with a $200m UK pledge

The Nvidia-backed AI video firm joins Anthropic and OpenAI in betting on London, citing customers including the BBC, Fremantle and WPP.

Runway is making London its European headquarters and has pledged to put more than $200m into the UK’s AI ecosystem by the end of 2028, the company told CNBC on Monday.

The New York firm, best known for the AI video tools that have found their way into film and advertising, becomes the latest American AI company to plant a serious flag in the British capital.

The choice is partly a matter of proximity to the customers already paying for the product. London “puts us close to many of our largest European customers already doing serious work with Runway, including BBC, Fremantle and WPP, and it builds on the research team we already have here,” said Anastasis Germanidis, the company’s co-founder and co-chief executive.

The new hub will expand a research presence Runway has been growing in the city rather than start one from scratch.

Runway is not, despite one summary doing the rounds, a British company. It is headquartered in New York and most recently raised $315m in a Series E led by General Atlantic, a round that valued it at $5.3bn.

Nvidia took part, as did AMD Ventures, Fidelity, Adobe Ventures and others. The chipmaker’s involvement is the thread running through several of these London announcements; Runway also runs its newer world-model work on Nvidia’s hardware.

Those world models are where Runway is trying to head next. The company started by building video-generation and editing tools, the Gen-series models that produce short clips from text or images, and has since framed its ambition more broadly as building AI that simulates the physical world, with applications it lists across film, gaming, science and robotics. It is a pitch that puts the firm in direct competition with Google, among others.

The London move slots into a pattern. Anthropic’s European build-out now spans several capitals, and in April the company announced office space in London for some 800 staff, shortly after OpenAI confirmed its first permanent office in the city.

The pull is partly the talent pool, which Runway cited explicitly, and partly the British government’s sustained effort to present the country as the natural European home for AI research. The labs have, for now, obliged.

Runway is also not the first Nvidia-backed firm to make this exact announcement. In December, the video and world-model startup Luma AI unveiled its own London expansion, with the chipmaker again in the cap table.

The recurrence is not a coincidence so much as a consequence of where Nvidia has placed its money, and of a UK push that has been actively recruiting its portfolio.

What Runway has not detailed is how the $200m breaks down, how many people it intends to hire, or over what schedule beyond the 2028 marker. The company said it expects to expand further across Europe in due course. For the moment, the firm has named a city, a figure and a deadline, and left the rest for later.