creators

Igor Babuschkin - River AI CEO, xAI co-founder

Igor Babuschkin co-founded xAI, left in 2025, and in June 2026 launched River AI, which raised $1.1bn to build personally trainable AI agents.

Igor Babuschkin is an AI researcher and investor who co-founded xAI with Elon Musk in July 2023 and left the company in August 2025. He began in physics, working on the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, then moved to DeepMind, where he worked on WaveNet and on AlphaStar, the multi-agent reinforcement learning system that reached Grandmaster level at StarCraft II. He went on to OpenAI, on reasoning and pretraining, before xAI, where by his own account he led infrastructure, training, multimodal systems and product, and came up with the name Grok. After leaving xAI he set up Babuschkin Ventures to back AI founders, and still runs it. In June 2026 he came out of stealth with River AI, where he is co-founder and CEO. It is building a stack for personal AI, starting with an API that lets developers reinforcement-train and LoRA fine-tune open models they own, so that an agent learns from its user rather than replacing them. In August 2026 River announced $1.1 billion across a seed and Series A led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek taking part; it lists offices in Palo Alto and Austin.

Specialization

reinforcement learning, large-scale model training, AI agents, AI safety investing

Country

United States