Palo Alto-based River AI, a US AI startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised US$1.1 billion in a seed and series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC.

Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek also participated.

The company came out of stealth in June and is building tools for developers and enterprises to train and fine-tune open models, including an application programming interface that supports reinforcement learning and low-rank adaptation fine-tuning.

River also has operations in Austin, Texas, and Babuschkin serves as its CEO.

Babuschkin previously held AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI.

River said its platform is designed to give customers more control over how their AI models are trained and deployed.

The funding is unusually large for a company at this stage. Recent series A rounds averaged about US$20 million, according to Eqvista.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch