River AI announced $1.1 billion across Series Seed and Series A on August 11, 2026, led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures and participation from Y Combinator and Temasek.
Founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, River provides an API for LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on frontier open-weight models. Babuschkin: “AI should be open, freely available, and affordable… We started River to allow people and companies to own their intelligence.”
The company was incorporated April 2026 and declined to disclose valuation. NYT reported ~100M personal capital. Long-term vision: personal AI users own and control.