River AI Raises $1.1B to Build Personal AI Assistants From Scratch
River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, secures $1.1 billion in a seed and Series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. Heavyweights including Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek also join the round, making it one of the largest early-stage investments in recent memory for a company that only emerged from stealth in June.
Babuschkin envisions a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence, aiming to rebuild the entire stack from training and models to hardware. Rather than creating human worker replacements like other labs, River wants to turn AI agents into personally trainable assistants that function more like guardian angels — quietly present, deeply personalized, and wholly owned by the user rather than by a corporation.
River already offers an API that lets developers train and fine-tune open models using reinforcement learning and low-rank adaptation, positioning itself as an alternative to closed systems where users cannot truly own or improve their models. The company claims enterprises can complete complex reinforcement learning runs in 15 to 20 minutes with no infrastructure team required, at significant cost savings over closed-source options.