General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI

River AI, a two-month-old startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has secured $1.1 billion in a seed/Series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek, TechCrunch reported.

AMP PBC is an AI-focused investment firm founded in 2026 by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner who backed Black Forest Labs, Mistral AI, LMArena, and OpenRouter during his time at a16z.

River came out of stealth in June with a mission to reinvent AI from scratch, starting with how models are trained. Babuschkin, whose resume includes AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI, wants to turn agents into personally trainable assistants rather than following the trajectory other AI labs are on: human worker replacements.

"To get there, we believe the stack has to be rebuilt end to end: training, models, the product layer, and new hardware that lets personal AI live close to you," he wrote in his launch blog. He envisions capable agents as "guardian angels: quietly present, on your side, helping with what actually matters to you."

The company already offers an API billed per 1 million tokens, with rates depending on the open model used, letting developers apply reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning to the models. "Prompting steers a model you don't own and can't improve. River lets you train open models into ones that are truly yours," its product literature says.

The round lands as enterprises wake up to wanting control over their AI model destiny by mixing models, including open weights. River promises to solve the post-training expertise part of that problem with its neocloud offering, claiming any enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning run in 15 to 20 minutes with no infrastructure team required, at two to four times the cost savings relative to closed-source alternatives.

The bigger vision is that everyone will have their own agents, trained by themselves, and working on their behalf — a concept already emerging with personal, locally running agents like OpenClaw and its derivatives, and with Nvidia partnering with PC makers such as Dell, Microsoft, and HP on AI-capable hardware.

How River's technology will differ from these efforts remains to be seen. But it is starting out with a war chest full of cash to try — a striking signal of how much capital is now flowing into the personal-agent赛道.