River AI Raises $1.1 Billion in Seed and Series A Funding

River AI was founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin and formally unveiled on June 10, 2026, with a bet that artificial intelligence should augment people rather than displace them. The startup plans to rebuild the stack spanning training, models, products and hardware, aiming to give individuals and businesses ownership of AI systems that can learn continuously from their data, preferences and goals. Its approach contrasts with general-purpose models controlled by large laboratories and rented to customers on a per-token basis.

On August 11, 2026, River AI said it had raised $1.1 billion across seed and Series A financings led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. NVIDIA and AMD Ventures made strategic investments, while Y Combinator and Temasek also participated. River said the capital would accelerate development of its full stack and API, which it says can complete a complex reinforcement-learning run in 15 to 20 minutes and deliver cost savings of two to four times compared with closed-source alternatives.