Featherless.ai Raises $5M in Seed Funding to Democratize Access to Open Source AI Models

Featherless.ai, the leading serverless AI inference platform, has raised US$5 million in Seed funding from investors including Airbus Ventures, 500 Global, Kickstart Ventures, HF0, Panache Ventures and Oakseed Ventures. Featherless.ai provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models. The company’s breakthrough innovation optimizes GPU utilization and eliminates costly downtime to enable AI inference at significantly lower costs.

“AI has the power to transform industries and empower individuals around the globe. However, accessing and utilizing a diverse range of models can be cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging for many users, particularly those in emerging markets, where there’s no shortage of demand for AI solutions. Featherless.ai is changing the game by providing an affordable and scalable solution for using open source AI models in production,” remarks Eugene Cheah, Founder and CEO. “I don't want a future where AI is controlled by the few. I want to empower individuals globally.”

Democratizing Access to Open Source AI

Featherless.ai provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models. With over 4,000 models - including popular options like DeepSeek, LLama, and continuously onboarding new models every week - Featherless.ai offers a flat capacity pricing model that ensures cost predictability and scalability. Through this model, businesses can dynamically scale AI usage without worrying about unexpected charges or rate limits, and instead focus their energies on running experiments to develop, test, and fine-tune their models. With the latest funding, the company has plans to support all major AI modalities — including embeddings, vision, and speech. 

For casual AI users, Featherless.ai serverless platform offers a low entry point of just $10 per month, providing access to a wide range of the latest open-source models without the need for expensive high-end GPUs. For businesses and enterprises, the platform delivers scale and significant cost efficiencies through dynamic AI workload scaling and flat capacity pricing.

A Breakthrough in AI Model Deployment

With the new funding, Featherless.ai will advance research and development into next-generation AI architectures that can dramatically lower inference costs, making AI deployment feasible on lower cost hardware rather than requiring high-end GPUs. 

Featherless.ai’s architecture enables seamless support for over 100 languages without any performance degradation. This breakthrough removes a major barrier to global AI deployment, where existing systems struggle to maintain consistency across multiple languages. 

The company's proprietary hot-swapping technology allows AI models to be switched in under 5 seconds, compared to the 30 minutes typically required to load a new AI model onto a standard GPU. This innovation optimizes GPU utilization, eliminates costly downtime, and dramatically reduces operational costs.

The team is also actively involved in the development of the open-source RWKV foundation model project, the first AI model under the Linux Foundation, which has been deployed on Windows to billions of devices*. This effort is also part of their broader commitment to develop better and more accessible AI models across languages, and reduce the reliance on closed-source models from major tech companies.

“The biggest hurdle to scaling AI is compute cost. Featherless.ai tackles this head-on by providing the trifecta of efficient, effective and affordable AI deployment to businesses globally. Our portfolio companies are avid users of Featherless.ai, and we look forward to expanding that across all the regions we invest in,” shares Vishal Harnal, Managing Partner at 500 Global.

“Our research into foundational model development revealed that while much of the AI industry has focused on scaling existing transformer models, fundamental inefficiencies in the architecture have remained unaddressed. As most foundational models struggle to maintain performance across multiple languages, creating accessibility barriers in global markets, these structural inefficiencies have threatened to stifle competition and innovation across the broader global ecosystem,” explains Yuichiro Hikosaka, Principal at Airbus Ventures. “Now enter Featherless.ai - a serverless platform that empowers users to run, test, and fine-tune the latest models seamlessly and affordably. Featherless.ai is ready and primed to address a global market.”

“We see Large Language Models being experimented and integrated into applications everywhere, Featherless.ai plays a unique role in enabling organizations to test, integrate and run any and every open source LLM easily and cost-effectively. Their innovative approach and focus on serving diverse markets make them a standout in this rapidly growing space,” says Chee-We Ng, Managing Partner at Oakseed Ventures.

Featherless.ai is co-founded by Eugene Cheah (CEO), Harrison Vanderbyl (CTO), and Wesley George (COO), who bring combined experience of 30 years building software and leading engineering teams.

About Featherless.ai

Featherless.ai is a serverless inference platform. Its goal is to make all AI models available for serverless inference. The company provides inference via API to a continually expanding library of open-weight models enabling enterprises and individuals to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence without worrying about underlying infrastructure. For more information, visit www.featherless.ai

Featherless.ai is hiring! If you're passionate about making AI open and accessible, send your cover letter to [email protected]

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*RWKV.cpp - shipping to 1.5 billion systems worldwide (https://blog.rwkv.com/p/rwkvcpp-shipping-to-half-a-billion)