River AI raised $1.1bn to let companies train and keep their own models

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/08/river-ai-1-1-billion-babuschkin-general-catalyst-open-weights.jpg

TL;DR

River AI raised $1.1bn led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. NVIDIA and AMD Ventures took strategic stakes, Y Combinator and Temasek joined. Founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, incorporated in Nevada in April. Sells fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on open weight models. No valuation disclosed.

River AI has raised $1.1bn, roughly four months after the company was incorporated. General Catalyst and AMP PBC led the round, with strategic investment from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures, and further money from Y Combinator and Temasek. The Palo Alto company was founded by Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI.

The pitch is that companies should train and own models rather than rent general-purpose ones. River sells an API for LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on frontier open weight models, taking on the infrastructure underneath, including weight transfers, sampling-training consistency and elastic compute.

Its performance claims are its own and have not been...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE

Read more