xAI co-founder's River AI raises $1.1 billion to expand AI model tools

Investing.com -- River AI announced Tuesday it has secured $1.1 billion in funding to expand tools that help clients build personalized AI models using their own data. The startup was founded by Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI.

General Catalyst and AMP PBC led the funding round, with strategic investments from Nvidia and AMD Ventures. Y Combinator and Temasek also participated in the raise.

River AI stated it expects enterprise AI to move away from general-purpose models provided by large labs toward companies customizing and owning their own models through open-weight models.

The company's API enables enterprises to complete complex reinforcement-learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without requiring an infrastructure team. River AI said this approach 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.

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