River AI, a full-stack AI company founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised $1.1bn in a round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from Nvidia and AMD Ventures.
Y Combinator and Temasek also took part in the investment round.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
River AI is based in Palo Alto, California, and works on personal, continually improving AI.
The company said the funding will support its work on personal AI and on tools that let developers and companies train, tune and serve their own models. Its stated aim is to place ownership of AI with the people and organisations using it.
River AI CEO Igor Babuschkin said: “The way AI is built today is not how it will be built in the future.
“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.
“We started River to allow people and companies to own their intelligence.”
The company’s API offers LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for frontier open weight models. Billing is metered on tokens used for training and inference.
River AI said that approach removes the cost of idle GPU capacity, and that trained models can be deployed to production instantly.
According to the company, an enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning training run in 15 to 20 minutes without an infrastructure team. It put the cost saving at two to four times relative to closed-source alternatives.
River AI said its platform handles fast weight transfers, sampling-training consistency and elastic compute. It noted that building a custom model has until now required a dedicated infrastructure team, specialised hardware and months of work.
The company plans an integrated stack covering new hardware, training infrastructure and products centred on personalisation and continual learning. It said its longer-term goal is to extend the same control to individual users.
Before joining xAI as a co-founder, Babuschkin had worked in generative modelling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind and had overseen large-scale training efforts at OpenAI.
The founding team of River AI includes people who previously worked at xAI and Tesla.
General Catalyst managing director Marc Bhargava said: “There is a gap between what AI can do and what most companies actually experience.
“Until now, companies have lacked a cost-efficient way to train, tune, and own custom AI models. River closes this gap, helping any company build models on their own data, tailored to how they actually work.”
