River AI raises $1.1 billion to rebuild AI models from scratch for personalized enterprise use

General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI

River AI, an AI startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has secured $1.1 billion in funding in a seed/Series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. (AMP PBC is an AI-focused investment firm founded in 2026 by former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha, backer of companies at a16z like Black Forest Labs, Mistral AI, LMArena and OpenRouter.) River came out of stealth in June with a fascinating mission. Babuschkin, whose resume includes AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI, intends to reinvent AI from scratch, beginning with how models are trained. This is in order to turn agents into personally trainable assistants, rather than following the trajectory other AI labs are on: human worker replacements. "To get there, we believe the stack has to be rebuilt end to end: training, models, the product layer, and new hardware that lets personal AI live close to you," he wrote in his launch blog. "Capable agents will be a normal part of everyday life. Less like the assistants you call on today when you need a task done, more like guardian angels: quietly present, on your side, helping with what actually matters to you. They will know you well, and they will be yours, not someone else's," he envisions. River already offers an API, billed per 1 million tokens, with rates dependent on the open model used. The API allows developers to use both reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on the models. This first product is intended to be an antidote to prompt engineering. "Prompting steers a model you don't own and can't improve. River lets you train open models into ones that are truly yours -- and serve them like any other endpoint," the product literature says. While this round is an eye-popping-size investment for a nascent company, and perhaps another indication of the overheated AI atmosphere, River's premise comes at a particularly auspicious time. Enterprises are waking up to wanting to control their AI model destiny by using a mix of models, including open weight. River is promising to solve the post-training expertise part of that problem with its neocloud offering. "Any enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning run in 15 to 20 minutes with no infrastructure team required, at two to four times the cost savings relative to closed-source alternatives," it wrote in its funding announcement. The bigger vision of this company is that everyone will have their own agents, trained by themselves, and working on their behalf. We are already seeing this concept in action with the rise of personal, locally-running agents in the form of OpenClaw and its derivatives. Plus, we are already seeing Nvidia partner with PC makers like Dell, Microsoft, HP for AI-capable hardware. How River's tech will differ remains to be seen. But it's starting out with a war chest full of cash to try.

XAI co-founder's startup River AI raises $1.1 billion to expand custom AI tools

Aug 11 (Reuters) - Startup River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, said on Tuesday it has raised $1.1 billion, looking to expand tools that help clients build personalized AI models on their own data. The fundraise was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and AMD Ventures (AMD.O), opens new tab. Additional investors ⁠included Y Combinator and Temasek. Reporting by Prathik Jayaprakash in Bengaluru; Editing by Joyjeet Das Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

River AI raised $1.1bn to let companies train and keep their own models

River AI raised $1.1bn led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. NVIDIA and AMD Ventures took strategic stakes, Y Combinator and Temasek joined. Founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, incorporated in Nevada in April. Sells fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on open weight models. No valuation disclosed. River AI has raised $1.1bn, roughly four months after the company was incorporated. General Catalyst and AMP PBC led the round, with strategic investment from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures, and further money from Y Combinator and Temasek. The Palo Alto company was founded by Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI. The pitch is that companies should train and own models rather than rent general-purpose ones. River sells an API for LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on frontier open weight models, taking on the infrastructure underneath, including weight transfers, sampling-training consistency and elastic compute. Its performance claims are its own and have not been independently tested. River says a complex reinforcement learning run takes 15 to 20 minutes through its API with no infrastructure team required, at two to four times the cost saving of closed-source alternatives. Billing is metered on tokens used for training and inference, which the company says removes the expense of idle GPU capacity. "The way AI is built today is not how it will be built in the future," said Babuschkin, River's chief executive. "AI should be open, freely available, and affordable. It should feel like it is working for the person using it, not the lab that trained it." The plan extends past software. River says it is building hardware that lets personal AI sit close to the person it serves, alongside the training infrastructure and products built around personalisation and continual learning. General Catalyst framed the investment in national terms. "American leadership in AI urgently requires leadership in open weight models, while maintaining a lead in closed frontier models," chief executive Hemant Taneja said, describing River's agenda as "a priority for American resilience." It is an argument that has been gaining backers, with Nvidia among those signing an open letter on American open weight leadership that OpenAI and Anthropic did not join. Babuschkin worked on generative modelling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind, then led large-scale training efforts at OpenAI, before helping start xAI. He left Musk's company in August 2025, initially to set up a venture firm. All 11 of xAI's co-founders have now departed. The round came in above target. Forbes reported in May that Babuschkin was seeking up to $1bn at a valuation of as much as $5bn, and that he intended to put up to $100mn of his own money in. River AI was incorporated in Nevada on April 20. No valuation was disclosed on Tuesday.

River AI raises $1.1 billion for enterprise AI tools

River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion on Tuesday, with the funds earmarked for expanding the company's suite of products designed to let enterprises train AI models on their own proprietary data. General Catalyst and AMP PBC co-led the funding, which also drew strategic participation from Nvidia $NVDA and AMD $AMD Ventures, along with Y Combinator and Temasek. The company did not reveal a valuation figure. River AI's thesis holds that the enterprise market will migrate from off-the-shelf offerings by major AI labs toward privately owned, open-weight models tailored to each organization's needs. To support that shift, its API can complete reinforcement-learning training runs in as little as 15 to 20 minutes -- no in-house infrastructure team required -- at a cost the company claims is two to four times lower than closed-source rivals. "AI should be open, freely available, and affordable. It should feel like it is working for the person using it, not the lab that trained it," Babuschkin said in a statement. Before founding River AI, Babuschkin's résumé included research roles in generative modeling and reinforcement learning at Google $GOOGL DeepMind, a stint leading large-scale training efforts at OpenAI, and ultimately a role as co-founder of xAI.

Personalized AI startup River AI raises $1.1B from consortium backed by Nvidia, AMD

River AI Inc., a startup that helps enterprises customize open-source artificial intelligence models, has raised $1.1 billion in early-stage funding. The company stated in today's Series A funding announcement that it received the capital over two rounds. General Catalyst and AMP PBC were the lead investors. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek. River AI is led by Chief Executive Officer Igor Babuschkin. He earlier co-founded xAI Corp. and worked at DeepMind as a researcher. Babuschkin helped develop the Alphabet Inc. unit's AlphaCode system, the first coding AI that demonstrated competitive performance in a programming contest. River AI's inaugural product is a cloud service called the River API. It enables developers to tailor open-source large language models to their requirements by putting them through additional training. According to the company, the service supports LLMs with 35 billion to 1 trillion parameters. River API customizes open-source models using a method called LoRA, or low-rank adaptation.It works by extending the model being customized with a small number of additional artificial neurons. Those extra neurons equip the LLM with capabilities that it doesn't possess out of the box. The primary selling point of LoRA is its cost efficiency. The standard way to extend an LLM's capabilities is to retrain it from scratch, which can be highly resource-intensive. LoRA only requires software teams to train the small number of additional neurons they added to the model. River AI says that the River API enables users to customize a model in 15 to 20 minutes. Additionally, it automates time-consuming prerequisites such as configuring the infrastructure on which training is carried out. The company says that models customized using its service can be up to four times more cost-efficient than proprietary alternatives. The River API is the first component of an expansive AI product suite River AI is currently developing. According to the company, the next addition will be a set of features designed to deliver "personalization and continual learning for agents." In a July blog post, Babuschkin wrote that the company's long-term goal is to develop personal AI systems capable of adapting to user preferences. "It is yours, not rented, and you have real control over it," he detailed. The executive also disclosed that the company's engineering push is not focused solely on software. A job posting indicates that River AI plans to develop a custom system-on-chip with an onboard machine learning accelerator. The company will produce the processor using "advanced foundry nodes." River AI plans to offer a compiler that will automatically turn customer LLMs built using PyTorch, a popular AI framework, into a form that can run efficiently on its silicon.

XAI cofounder's startup River AI raises $1.1 billion to expand custom AI tools

River AI said it is betting that enterprise AI will shift from companies using general-purpose ⁠models from large labs to customizing and owning their own models, using open-weight models. Startup River AI, founded by xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, said on Tuesday it has raised $1.1 billion, looking to expand tools that help clients build personalized AI models on their own data. The fundraise was ⁠led ⁠by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from Nvidia and AMD Ventures. Additional investors included Y Combinator and Temasek. River AI said it is betting that enterprise AI will shift from companies using general-purpose ⁠models from large labs to customizing and owning their own models, using open-weight models. ⁠The company added that its API allows enterprises to perform complex reinforcement-learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without an infrastructure team and is two to four times more cost-effective than closed-source alternatives. "AI should be open, freely available, and affordable. It should feel like it is working for the person using it, not the ⁠lab that trained it," CEO Igor Babuschkin said. Babuschkin previously worked on generative-modeling and reinforcement-learning at Google DeepMind and led large-scale training at OpenAI before co-founding xAI. River AI declined to comment on how much the funding valued it at.

River AI Raises $1.1 Billion to Accelerate Development of Personal AI Model

River AI said it raised $1.1 billion in funding to build a personal AI model, led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC with strategic investments from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures. The funding will accelerate River AI's mission to build powerful personal AI and give companies tools to train their own AI models, the full-stack AI company said. "The core philosophy of putting ownership of intelligence in the hands of the people using it will prove to be on the right side of history for the open weight ecosystem," said General Catalyst Chief Executive Hemant Taneja. River AI was founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who left the company last year. The company said Babuschkin worked on generative modeling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind and led large-scale training efforts at OpenAI. Babuschkin said that River AI will work to make AI open, freely available and affordable. The company received additional investments from Y Combinator and Temasek.