General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI
General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI
General Catalyst 领投成立仅两个月的 River AI，融资额达 11 亿美元
River AI, an AI startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has secured $1.1 billion in funding in a seed/Series A round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. (AMP PBC is an AI-focused investment firm founded in 2026 by former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha, backer of companies at a16z like Black Forest Labs, Mistral AI, LMArena and OpenRouter.)
River AI 是一家由 xAI 联合创始人 Igor Babuschkin 创立的 AI 初创公司，近日在种子轮/A 轮融资中筹集了 11 亿美元。本轮融资由 General Catalyst 和 AMP PBC 领投，Nvidia、AMD Ventures、Y Combinator 和淡马锡（Temasek）参投。（AMP PBC 是一家专注于 AI 领域的投资公司，由前 Andreessen Horowitz 合伙人 Anjney Midha 于 2026 年创立，他曾支持过 Black Forest Labs、Mistral AI、LMArena 和 OpenRouter 等 a16z 投资组合公司。）
River came out of stealth in June with a fascinating mission. Babuschkin, whose resume includes AI roles at DeepMind and OpenAI, intends to reinvent AI from scratch, beginning with how models are trained. This is in order to turn agents into personally trainable assistants, rather than following the trajectory other AI labs are on: human worker replacements.
River 于今年 6 月结束隐身状态，并带着一个引人注目的使命亮相。Babuschkin 的履历包括曾在 DeepMind 和 OpenAI 担任 AI 相关职务，他打算从模型训练方式入手，从零开始重塑 AI。其目标是将 AI 智能体转变为可由个人训练的助手，而不是像其他 AI 实验室那样走“取代人类员工”的老路。
“To get there, we believe the stack has to be rebuilt end to end: training, models, the product layer, and new hardware that lets personal AI live close to you,” he wrote in his launch blog. “Capable agents will be a normal part of everyday life. Less like the assistants you call on today when you need a task done, more like guardian angels: quietly present, on your side, helping with what actually matters to you. They will know you well, and they will be yours, not someone else’s,” he envisions.
“为了实现这一目标，我们认为必须从端到端重构技术栈：包括训练、模型、产品层，以及能让个人 AI 贴近你运行的新型硬件，”他在发布博客中写道。“强大的智能体将成为日常生活的一部分。它们不像你今天在需要完成任务时才呼叫的助手，更像是守护天使：安静地存在，站在你这边，帮助你处理真正重要的事情。它们会非常了解你，而且它们属于你，而不是别人，”他设想道。
River already offers an API, billed per 1 million tokens, with rates dependent on the open model used. The API allows developers to use both reinforcement learning (RL) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on the models. This first product is intended to be an antidote to prompt engineering. “Prompting steers a model you don’t own and can’t improve. River lets you train open models into ones that are truly yours — and serve them like any other endpoint,” the product literature says.
River 目前已经提供 API 服务，按每 100 万 token 计费，费率取决于所使用的开源模型。该 API 允许开发者对模型进行强化学习（RL）和低秩自适应（LoRA）微调。这一首款产品旨在成为“提示工程”（prompt engineering）的解药。产品文档中写道：“提示词只能引导一个你不拥有且无法改进的模型。而 River 让你能够将开源模型训练成真正属于你的模型，并像调用其他端点一样使用它们。”
While this round is an eye-popping-size investment for a nascent company, and perhaps another indication of the overheated AI atmosphere, River’s premise comes at a particularly auspicious time. Enterprises are waking up to wanting to control their AI model destiny by using a mix of models, including open weight. River is promising to solve the post-training expertise part of that problem with its neocloud offering.
尽管对于一家初创公司来说，这笔融资规模令人咋舌，或许也反映了当前 AI 市场的过热，但 River 的理念出现得恰逢其时。企业正逐渐意识到，通过混合使用包括开源权重模型在内的多种模型，可以掌握自身 AI 模型的发展方向。River 正承诺通过其“neocloud”产品来解决这一过程中训练后的专业技术难题。
“Any enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement learning run in 15 to 20 minutes with no infrastructure team required, at two to four times the cost savings relative to closed-source alternatives,” it wrote in its funding announcement. The bigger vision of this company is that everyone will have their own agents, trained by themselves, and working on their behalf.
“任何企业都可以在无需基础设施团队的情况下，在 15 到 20 分钟内完成复杂的强化学习运行，且成本比闭源替代方案节省两到四倍，”该公司在融资公告中写道。该公司的宏大愿景是，每个人都将拥有由自己训练、并为自己工作的专属智能体。
We are already seeing this concept in action with the rise of personal, locally running agents in the form of OpenClaw and its derivatives. Plus, we are already seeing Nvidia partner with PC makers like Dell, Microsoft, and HP for AI-capable hardware. How River’s tech will differ remains to be seen. But it’s starting out with a war chest full of cash to try.
我们已经看到这一概念在 OpenClaw 及其衍生产品等个人本地运行智能体的兴起中得到实践。此外，Nvidia 也已与戴尔、微软和惠普等 PC 制造商合作开发具备 AI 能力的硬件。River 的技术将有何不同尚待观察，但它已经带着充足的资金储备开始了尝试。