General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI

River AI, an AI startup co-founded by xAI's Igor Babuschkin, has successfully secured a substantial $1.1 billion funding round to revolutionize the AI landscape. General Catalyst and AMP PBC led the seed/Series A investment, joined by Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. Founded in 2026 by former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha, AMP PBC is an AI-focused investment firm.

River AI emerged from stealth mode in June, with the ambitious goal of reinventing AI from the ground up, focusing on how models are trained. Babuschkin, who has previously worked at DeepMind and OpenAI, aims to create agents that can be personally trained, instead of replacing human workers. He envisions these agents as personally trainable assistants, always by the user's side, helping with what truly matters.

River AI's first product is an API, billed per million tokens, with rates varying based on the open model used. The API enables developers to fine-tune open models using reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) techniques. This approach aims to provide a solution to the prompt engineering dilemma, allowing users to train open models as their own and serve them like any other endpoint.

Given the current investment climate, River AI's funding round is particularly noteworthy. Enterprises are increasingly seeking control over their AI model destinies, and River AI promises to address this need with its neocloud offering. The company claims that any enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning run in 15-20 minutes with no infrastructure team needed, at a significant cost savings compared to closed-source alternatives.

River AI's long-term vision is to enable individuals to have their own agents, trained and working on their behalf. This concept is already being realized with the rise of personal, locally running agents like OpenClaw and its derivatives. Moreover, Nvidia has already partnered with PC makers like Dell, Microsoft, and HP to deliver AI-capable hardware, further highlighting the growing importance of this technology.