Aug 14, 2026
xAI co-founder's River AI raises $1.1B for custom AI models
River AI, led by Igor Babuschkin, secured $1.1 billion to help companies build personalized AI models on proprietary data, backed by General Catalyst, AMP PBC, NVIDIA, and AMD Ventures.
River AI, the startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised $1.1 billion to expand tools that let companies build and own personalized AI models using their proprietary data.
The round was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investments from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures. River AI's API is designed to complete complex reinforcement-learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without requiring an infrastructure team, signaling a push toward customizable open-weight models over general-purpose closed models.
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