Featherless.ai, the fastest-growing platform for running open-source AI, has raised $20 million in Series A funding to give enterprises a new path to AI independence. The round was co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from Kickstart Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.
In an ecosystem dominated by hyperscalers, Featherless.ai offers a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments. It will use the capital to scale its global infrastructure, launch a dedicated marketplace for specialised open models and deepen its technical integration with diverse hardware architectures to drive down the cost of AI inference. This is especially important in the Philippines, where AI adoption among companies is steadily increasing, and more accessible, independent solutions can help sustain long-term uptake.
Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-Founder of Featherless.ai, said: “When a few dominant players control the entire stack, it stifles competition and limits what developers can imagine. We’re building the infrastructure that makes open-source AI practical and reliable at scale, ensuring that enterprises can build on a foundation they actually own rather than one they merely rent.”
Currently, as the fastest-growing Hugging Face inference partner, Featherless.ai supports over 30,000 open models, from language and vision to audio, enabling developers to deploy production-grade AI instantly. It is a neutral layer for AI, unaligned with any hyperscaler, any chipmaker or any proprietary ecosystem. By hosting its core infrastructure in the US and EU with a global team across Canada, Europe, the US, Singapore and Australia, Featherless.ai is meeting a critical demand for sovereign AI, to respect jurisdictional boundaries and data privacy.
A core part of the Featherless.ai mission is hardware diversity. Through a strategic collaboration with AMD, the company ensures that the world’s most popular open-source models run natively on the AMD ROCm™ software platform. This provides a competitive, auditable alternative to proprietary hardware systems, giving businesses a structural cost advantage.
“Featherless is making frontier AI accessible at a fraction of the cost — and that matters enormously in markets like Southeast Asia, where the next wave of AI-native builders shouldn’t have to pay hyperscaler prices to compete. That’s exactly the kind of infrastructure bet we want to be behind,” Kickstart Ventures General Partner Joan Yao said.
Featherless.ai also aims to protect the industry from the dangers of AI monopolies. By ensuring that state-of-the-art models remain accessible outside proprietary ‘walled gardens’, Featherless.ai provides developers with the creative flexibility to build the next generation of applications.
The company’s technical authority is built on deep research. The founding team created RWKV, a breakthrough open-source architecture designed to challenge the traditional dominance of transformers.
“This investment signals a turning point in the AI market. While the first wave of adoption was defined by proprietary, closed-door ecosystems, we provide a neutral ground for a second phase where companies can own and run their own models without being tethered to a single cloud provider or a restricted tech stack.” Cheah added.
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