Key facts
- River AI raised $1.1 billion in a funding round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC.
- The startup was co-founded by Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI.
- River AI aims to build custom AI tools for enterprises, focusing on trainable AI agents.
- The company's API allows for reinforcement learning and LoRA fine-tuning on open models.
- River AI claims its platform enables complex training runs in 15-20 minutes with significant cost savings.
River AI, an AI startup co-founded by Igor Babuschkin, who previously co-founded xAI and worked at DeepMind and OpenAI, has raised $1.1 billion in a seed/Series A funding round. The round was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. The company's mission is to rebuild the AI stack from the ground up to create personally trainable AI agents, rather than models designed for human worker replacement. River AI offers an API that allows enterprises to perform reinforcement learning and low-rank adaptation fine-tuning on open-weight models, aiming to provide a more affordable and customizable alternative to closed-source solutions. The company claims its platform can complete complex reinforcement learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes with significant cost savings.