General Catalyst leads a $1.1B round into River AI — two months old, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin

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River AI, launched in June 2026 by Igor Babuschkin (xAI co-founder, previously DeepMind and OpenAI), raised $1.1 billion out of the gate on 2026-08-11 with General Catalyst leading and AMP PBC, Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek participating. The pitch is personally trainable agents rather than worker replacements — Babuschkin calls them 'guardian angels' that are 'yours, not someone else's.' The current product is a per-million-token API supporting reinforcement learning and LoRA fine-tuning on open models, with the claim that enterprises can finish a complex RL run in 15–20 minutes with no infrastructure team, at 2–4x cost savings versus closed-source alternatives.