River AI, an AI startup co-founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has successfully secured $1.1 billion in a seed/Series A funding round. The investment was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with additional participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek.
The company, which emerged from stealth in June, intends to rebuild the AI stack from end to end, including training, models, the product layer, and new hardware. This approach is designed to enable agents to become personally trainable assistants, rather than focusing on replacing human workers.
River AI currently provides an API that allows developers to apply reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning to open models. This product is presented as an alternative to prompt engineering, allowing users to train and own their models.
The company claims its neocloud offering can enable enterprises to complete complex reinforcement learning runs in 15 to 20 minutes without an infrastructure team, at a reported two to four times cost saving compared to closed-source alternatives.