River AI raises $1.1 billion in round led by General Catalyst

River AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Igor Babuschkin, former xAI co-founder, has secured $1.1 billion in funding in a seed/Series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. The company emerged from stealth in June with an intriguing mission: to reinvent AI from scratch, starting with how models are trained. The goal is to transform agents into personally trainable assistants, in contrast to the trajectory other AI companies are pursuing: human worker replacement. Babuschkin, whose experience includes AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI, plans to rebuild the entire AI stack. River already offers an API, billed per million tokens, with rates dependent on the open model used. The API enables developers to use both reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for fine-tuning models. This substantial investment for a nascent company reflects continuing confidence in the potential of AI startups.