XAI co-founder's startup River AI raises $1.1 billion to expand custom AI tools

Aug. 11 (Reuters) - Startup River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, said on Tuesday it has raised $1.1 billion, looking to expand tools that help clients build personalized AI models on their own data.

The fundraise was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from Nvidia NVDA.O and AMD Ventures AMD.O. Additional investors included Y Combinator and Temasek.

• River AI said it is betting that enterprise AI will shift from companies using general-purpose models from large labs to customizing and owning their own models, using open-weight models.
• The company added that its API allows enterprises to perform complex reinforcement-learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without an infrastructure team and is two to four times more cost-effective than closed-source alternatives.
• "AI should be open, freely available, and affordable. It should feel like it is working for the person using it, not the lab that trained it," CEO Igor Babuschkin said.
• Babuschkin previously worked on generative-modeling and reinforcement-learning at Google DeepMind GOOGL.O and led large-scale training at OpenAI before co-founding xAI.
• River AI declined to comment on how much the funding valued it at.