Featherless.ai, the fastest-growing 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, which offers a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments, 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.
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, Featherless.ai 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.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.
Featherless.ai’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
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.
“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 is a key enabler for making this a reality.”
Abby Hitchcock, Principal at Airbus Ventures, said: “The next wave of AI adoption will not be carried by a handful of general-purpose models, but by the millions of specialized, fine-tuned models already being built in the open. The challenge has never been whether those models exist; it’s whether they can be served reliably and at a cost that makes production deployment viable. Featherless.ai has solved the underlying architectural problem – loading models in seconds while keeping GPUs productively utilized – which is what finally makes the long tail commercially feasible. Our conviction in the team has only deepened since we first backed them, and we’re proud to help lead this next phase.”
Joan Yao, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures, said: “Featherless.ai embodies what we believe about AI — it’s infrastructure, not a vertical. We backed them at seed because of their technical edge in inference, and this round reinforces our conviction that they’re building something durable in an increasingly competitive space.”
Prashant Matta, Managing Partner at Panache Ventures, said: “Featherless.ai is one of those very rare startups that combines incredibly innovative and practical technology with an important and worthy company mission. The risk of the AI industry ultimately becoming dominated by a few players from one country is very real – solutions such as Featherless.ai provide a crucial alternative pathway for development.”