River AI raises $1.1 billion two months after founding

River AI, the AI infrastructure startup founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised $1.1 billion in a round led by General Catalyst and Amp PBC. Nvidia and AMD Ventures joined as strategic investors, alongside Y Combinator and Temasek. The round closed roughly two months after the company's founding.

Babuschkin previously worked on generative modelling and reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind before leading large-scale training efforts at OpenAI and co-founding xAI. River AI is building infrastructure that lets developers and enterprises train, fine-tune and serve their own AI models without assembling a dedicated infrastructure team or specialised hardware. The company says its platform can complete reinforcement-learning training runs in fifteen to twenty minutes at two to four times lower cost than closed-source alternatives.

A billion-dollar round for a two-month-old company signals how much capital is chasing infrastructure that promises cheaper, independent alternatives to the major model labs, rather than the models themselves.