Image generation Companies

Runway is a New York-based AI video company founded in 2018. It co-released Stable Diffusion in 2022, has built a series of video models from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5, and in February 2026 raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation.

Stability AI is a British generative-AI company founded in 2019 in London. It is known for releasing the open-weight Stable Diffusion image model in 2022, and it has since faced copyright lawsuits over training data.

Midjourney is a San Francisco-based independent research lab that runs an image generator. Founded and led by David Holz, it has never taken outside funding and has been involved in several copyright lawsuits.

PixVerse, founded in 2023 as Aishi Technology, is an AI video generation company whose in-house models power a web app, an API and agent tools; a March 2026 Series C made it a unicorn.

Chinese generative-AI company founded in March 2023 that built the Vidu video model and now describes two lines of work: world generation models and world action models.

Black Forest Labs is a German AI lab based in Freiburg im Breisgau, founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser. It develops the FLUX image models and raised a $300 million Series B in December 2025.