River AI, founded by Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, recently announced the completion of $1.1 billion in seed and Series A funding. This funding round was led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from renowned companies such as NVIDIA and AMD Ventures. Established in June this year, River AI currently has a team of around 20 members and has publicly launched its first product, River API. The complete open-source technology is expected to be released in a few months. Babuschkin is committed to breaking the monopoly of AI by a few companies, enabling businesses and individuals to own and control their own AI, allowing AI to continuously learn and dynamically adjust model capabilities during use. This philosophy stems from his experience working at DeepMind and OpenAI, as well as his valuable experience in co-founding xAI. In August 2025, Babuschkin left xAI to establish River AI. River AI is currently entering the market by addressing corporate needs, helping businesses fine-tune and optimize open-weight models using their own data through River API. Its long-term goal is to achieve continuous learning for AI and plans to extend its business to the hardware sector in the future, enabling personal AI to run on users' local devices. The company's profit model primarily relies on providing advanced services such as training and customization of open models. Additionally, Babuschkin believes that open models have the potential to surpass proprietary models in the future and emphasizes the need for the United States to build an autonomous and open AI ecosystem. General Catalyst hopes that River AI can become a key player for the United States in responding to China's open model ecosystem. Currently, River AI mainly focuses on fine-tuning and customizing open-weight models, with plans to gradually advance into training foundational models in the future.