Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI and a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind researcher, has launched a new AI startup called River AI. The company is developing personalized AI agents that learn from users and remain fully under their control — designed to augment human abilities rather than replace jobs.
The founding team includes several other ex-xAI employees: Vincent Stark, who led product safety at xAI until December 2025; Lily Lim, former general counsel; and the Soboliev brothers, Ievgen and Dmytro, who were engineers at the company. River AI plans to offer an API for third parties to build AI models, enabling continuous learning for personalized agents, and eventually expand into hardware and physical infrastructure.
Since xAI merged with SpaceX, dozens of employees and nearly all of its co-founders have left. Elon Musk has promised to rebuild xAI while SpaceX prepares for an IPO. Beyond River AI, other former xAI members have started their own ventures — for instance, Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He co-founded the AI lab Humans&.