Startup River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised $1.1 billion in funding to expand its custom artificial intelligence (AI) tools for clients. The fundraise was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from Nvidia and AMD Ventures. Additional investors included Y Combinator and Temasek.
Custom AI Models
River AI 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’s 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.
CEO Igor Babuschkin stated, ‘Artificial intelligence 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.’ Babuschkin previously worked on generative-modeling and reinforcement-learning at Google DeepMind and led large-scale training at OpenAI before co-founding xAI.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
