AI Startup Funding
xAI co-founder's River AI banks $1.1B to let firms own custom models
By Arjun
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11 Aug 8:09 PM
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Via River AI
River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion across seed and Series A rounds led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek joining. Its API offers LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on open-weight models up to about a trillion parameters, billed per token rather than idle GPUs. River says complex RL runs can finish in 15 to 20 minutes without an in-house infra team. Why it matters: capital is chasing owned post-trained agents over rented chat. Caveat: valuation was not disclosed, and personal hardware remains a longer bet.
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