River AI Raises $1.1 Billion for Open-Weight Model Tools

River AI, a startup founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion to expand its suite of tools for enterprise AI personalization. The funding round was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investments from Nvidia Corporation and AMD Ventures, alongside contributions from Y Combinator and Temasek.

The company provides an API for reinforcement learning and LoRA fine-tuning, allowing businesses to build and own their models. River AI claims its platform can complete complex training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without requiring a dedicated infrastructure team, at a cost two to four times lower than closed-source alternatives. In addition to software, the company intends to develop hardware to move personal AI closer to the end user.

General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja described the investment as a priority for American resilience and leadership in open-weight models. Babuschkin, who previously held roles at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, advocates for AI that is open, affordable, and designed to serve the user rather than the training laboratory.