River AI Raises $1.1 Billion for Enterprise Model Training as Nvidia, AMD Back Bet
Updated
Updated · Quartz · Aug 11
River AI Raises $1.1 Billion for Enterprise Model Training as Nvidia, AMD Back Bet
3 articles · Updated · Quartz · Aug 11
Summary
$1.1 billion in new funding will help River AI expand tools that let companies train AI models on their own proprietary data, the startup said Tuesday.
General Catalyst and AMP PBC co-led the round, with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek joining; River AI did not disclose a valuation.
River AI is pitching a shift away from off-the-shelf models toward privately owned, open-weight systems tailored to each enterprise’s needs.
Its API can finish reinforcement-learning training runs in 15 to 20 minutes without an in-house infrastructure team, at costs River AI says are two to four times lower than closed-source rivals.
The company was founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, whose prior roles included DeepMind, OpenAI and xAI, underscoring the startup’s focus on open and affordable AI.