Igor Babuschkin's River AI raises $1.1B to rebuild the full stack for personal agents
igor babuschkin's new startup river ai raised $1.1b in a seed/series a led by general catalyst to reinvent model training from scratch. this challenges the status quo of agents by prioritizing user-trainable personal assistants over generic human worker replacements.
river ai, an ai startup founded by xai co-founder igor babuschkin, raised $1.1b in a combined seed and series a round led by general catalyst and amp pbc to reinvent how ai models are trained. the company's neocloud api allows enterprises to fine-tune open models using reinforcement learning and lora, completing complex runs in roughly 15 minutes at two to four times the cost savings of closed-source alternatives. this approach aims to shift the industry focus from creating human worker replacements to building personal guardian angels that users own and train themselves. with backing from nvidia, amd, and y combinator, river intends to expand its vision to include new hardware that keeps personal ai close to the user.