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

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.