Rivera was founded by Paul Rivera as a R+D firm in August 1976 in Southern California.[1] Rivera manufacture a range of tube/valve-powered guitar amplifiers. Rivera amplifiers are generally thought to be similar in tone to amplifiers manufactured by Fender Amplifiers.
Before moving into manufacturing amps under his own name, Paul Rivera ran his own amplifer repair/modification shop, as noted above, and then worked for the Fender Electric Instrument Company, 1981-84 [2]. There he acted as Marketing Director, specifying a whole range of amplifiers and designing some himself. These were the last range to be made by Fender before its owners, CBS, sold the company[3] to its then management, and the last to be mass-produced by Fender with 'traditional' (non-PCB) methods.