River AI has raised $1.1 billion in a seed and Series A funding round. The investment was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC.
Other investors in the round included Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. River AI is an artificial intelligence startup founded by Igor Babuschkin, who also co-founded xAI.
AMP PBC is described as an AI-focused investment firm. It was founded in 2026 by Anjney Midha, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. During his time at Andreessen Horowitz, Midha backed companies including Black Forest Labs, Mistral AI, LMArena, and OpenRouter.
Founder’s background and vision
Igor Babuschkin held AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI prior to co-founding xAI. Unverified reports state that he worked on generative modeling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind, and led large-scale training at OpenAI.
Babuschkin has stated intentions to reinvent AI from scratch, starting with how models are trained. He aims to turn agents into personally trainable assistants rather than replacements for human workers. In written statements, he noted that capable agents will become a normal part of everyday life, envisioning them as more like guardian angels.
Product offering and market strategy
River AI emerged from stealth in June. The company offers an API billed per 1 million tokens, with rates depending on the open model used. The API allows developers to use both reinforcement learning and low-rank adaptation fine-tuning on the models.
According to River AI’s product literature, its first product is intended as an antidote to prompt engineering. The literature states that prompting steers a model you do not own and cannot improve. The company promises to solve the post-training expertise part of the model-control problem with its neocloud offering.
River AI states that any enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning run in 15 to 20 minutes without an infrastructure team. It also claims its offering is two to four times more cost-effective than closed-source alternatives.
Unverified attributions suggest River AI is betting that enterprise AI will shift from using general-purpose models from large labs to customizing and owning their own models using open-weight models. This aligns with observations that enterprises are increasingly seeking to control their AI model destiny by using a mix of models, including open weight.
River AI’s vision is that everyone will have their own agents, trained by themselves and working on their behalf. The rise of personal, locally-running agents such as OpenClaw is cited as demonstrating this concept. Additionally, Nvidia is partnering with PC makers including Dell, Microsoft, and HP for AI-capable hardware.
An unverified quote attributed to Igor Babuschkin, CEO of River AI, states that AI should be open, freely available, and affordable. River AI declined to comment on how much the funding valued the company.
