Featherless.ai Raises $5M in Seed Funding to Democratize Access to Open Source AI Models
Democratizing AI with instant access to 4,000+ open-source models through our breakthrough serverless platform
San Francisco - March 17, 2025 - We're excited to announce that Featherless.ai has raised US$5 million in Seed funding from investors including Airbus Ventures, 500 Global, Kickstart Ventures, HF0, Panache Ventures and Oakseed Ventures. As the leading serverless AI inference platform, we're on a mission to provide instant and affordable access to the world's largest collection of open-source AI models.
Our Vision: AI for Everyone
"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," notes our Founder and CEO Eugene Cheah. "Featherless.ai is changing the game by providing an affordable and scalable solution for using open source AI models in production. I don't want a future where AI is controlled by the few. I want to empower individuals globally."
What We Offer: The World's Largest Collection of Open-Source Models
At Featherless.ai, we provide instant and affordable access to over 4,000 open-source AI models - including popular options like DeepSeek and LLama - and we're continuously onboarding new models every week. Our flat capacity pricing model ensures cost predictability and scalability, allowing businesses to dynamically scale AI usage without worrying about unexpected charges or rate limits.
Instead of dealing with infrastructure headaches, our users can focus their energies on what matters: running experiments to develop, test, and fine-tune their models. With this new funding, we're planning to support all major AI modalities — including embeddings, vision, and speech.
For casual AI users, our 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, we deliver scale and significant cost efficiencies through dynamic AI workload scaling and flat capacity pricing.
Our Breakthrough Technology
With our new funding, we're advancing 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.
Our 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.
One of our proudest innovations is our proprietary hot-swapping technology, which 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.
We're 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 devices1. This effort is part of our broader commitment to develop better and more accessible AI models across languages, and reduce the reliance on closed-source models from major tech companies.
What Our Investors Are Saying
"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.
Yuichiro Hikosaka, Principal at Airbus Ventures, explains: "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. 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.
Our Team
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.
Join us!
Featherless.ai is hiring! If you're passionate about making AI open and accessible, send your cover letter to hello@featherless.ai. For more information about our platform and services, visit www.featherless.ai.
Together, we can democratize access to AI and ensure that these powerful technologies benefit everyone, not just those with unlimited resources.
RWKV.cpp - shipping to 1.5 billion systems worldwide (https://blog.rwkv.com/p/rwkvcpp-shipping-to-half-a-billion)