River AI raises $1.1 billion to scale custom open-model training
River AI raised a combined $1.1 billion across seed and Series A financing led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic participation from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures. Igor Babuschkin's startup offers LoRA fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for open-weight models through an API with customer-owned weights.
Why it matters: The financing backs a bet that enterprises will pay for fast, task-specific adaptation and deployment of open models rather than rely only on general-purpose closed APIs.