Why they are on the map
COO (Feb 2026); likely signs off on operational vendor spend. source — evidence dated 2026-02
Owns the human-data budget and vendor list.
How Runway buys data
Gen-4.5 (Dec 2025) cited 'significant advances in post-training' and ranked via blind pairwise human preference on the Artificial Analysis arena. 2026 hiring includes 'Research Engineer, Data Foundations' (design multimodal datasets for world models), 'MTS, Data Infrastructure' (billions of rows of multimodal data), and a 'Sr/Staff PM, ML Research'. Past content licensing deals (Getty Images 2023, Lionsgate 2024) show a legal/licensing buying path. No named human-data vendor found.
Co-CEOs (Germanidis, Valenzuela) since Feb 2026, and a CTO (Sindi). Research is led by Research Director Jimei Yang with research leads under him; there are separate Data Foundations and Data Infrastructure groups, plus Runway Studios (in-house creatives) and a Chief Creative Officer.
Known vendors: lmarena (Artificial Analysis arena for public ranking; not a vendor)
This person was mapped in pass 1. Career, what they have said on the record, interviews, connections, why they matter to us and how to reach them are added in pass 2.