Igor Babuschkin is co-founder and CEO of River AI, which raised $1.1 billion across its seed and Series A in August 2026, led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, to help companies train, tune and own custom AI models. He also founded Babuschkin Ventures. He previously co-founded xAI and worked at DeepMind and OpenAI, contributing to research including WaveNet, AlphaStar, reasoning, and model pretraining. He began in physics, including research on CERN's LHCb experiment, and earned a master's degree in physics from TU Dortmund in 2015.
Co-founder and CEO
River AI raised $1.1B across its seed and Series A (August 2026), led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC with NVIDIA and AMD Ventures participating.
Founder
Co-founder and Founding Chief Engineer
Contributed to WaveNet and AlphaStar.
Member of Technical Staff
Summer Research Student
Research on the LHCb experiment.
Master's degree, Physics
