Featherless.ai, a platform for running open-source AI, has secured $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 BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.
Featherless.ai is a serverless inference platform. Its goal is to make all AI models available for serverless inference. It offers a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments. The platform is built on deep research. The founding team created RWKV, a breakthrough open-source architecture designed to challenge the traditional dominance of transformers.
Currently cited as the fastest-growing Hugging Face inference partner, Featherless.ai supports over 30,000 open models across language, vision, and audio, enabling developers to deploy production-grade AI instantly.
It is a neutral layer for AI, unaligned with any hyperscaler, chipmaker, or proprietary ecosystem.
By hosting its core infrastructure in the US and EU and maintaining a global team across Canada, Europe, the US, Singapore, and Australia, Featherless.ai is meeting a critical demand for sovereign AI that respects jurisdictional boundaries and data privacy.
A core part of the Featherless.ai mission is hardware diversity. Through a strategic collaboration with AMD, Featherless.ai ensures that the world’s most popular open-source models run natively on AMD ROCm. This provides a competitive, auditable alternative to proprietary hardware systems, giving businesses a structural cost advantage.
Featherless.ai also aims to protect the industry from the dangers of AI monopolies. By ensuring that state-of-the-art models remain accessible beyond proprietary ‘walled gardens’, Featherless.ai enables developers to build the next generation of applications with greater creative flexibility.
According to Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Featherless.ai, 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.
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.”
Sagi Paz, Head of AMD Ventures, said:
“Featherless.ai is at the forefront of a critical new phase in the development of the AI industry. By providing a strong foundation for open-source AI, it helps expand access and supports a more competitive and diverse ecosystem. We are delighted to support Featherless.ai on their journey.”
Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures, said:
“As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises want more control over performance, cost, and where their data lives. Featherless.ai is making leading open models production-ready at scale.
Being able to use a variety of different models is key for future enterprise AI use cases.”
Featherless.ai 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 continue driving down the cost of AI inference.
Lead image: Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Featherless.ai.