Igor Babuschkin, who co-founded Elon Musk’s xAI, has stepped out on his own. His new venture, River AI, is betting that the future of artificial intelligence isn’t about one model to rule them all. It’s about giving individual users AI systems they can shape, own, and align with their own values.
Babuschkin announced River AI on April 20, and the company is already generating serious investor interest. As of mid-May, River AI is in discussions to raise as much as $1B in funding at a potential $5B valuation. General Catalyst is reportedly in talks to lead the round, and Babuschkin himself plans to invest up to $100M of his own money.
The pitch: AI that works for you, not a corporation
River AI’s core thesis is a direct challenge to how AI is currently built and deployed. Today’s dominant models, whether from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, are corporate products. They’re trained on centralized datasets, tuned to corporate safety policies, and delivered as services you rent rather than own.
River AI wants to flip that. The company is focused on building personal AI systems where users have genuine sovereignty over how their AI behaves.
