Featherless.ai Secures $5M in Seed Funding to Expand Access to Open-Source AI Models

San Francisco – March 17, 2025 – Featherless.ai, a serverless AI inference platform, has announced the successful closure of a $5 million Seed funding round, with backing from investors including Airbus Ventures, 500 Global, Kickstart Ventures, HF0, Panache Ventures, and Oakseed Ventures. The company aims to enhance access to open-source AI models by offering a scalable and cost-efficient alternative for developers and businesses.

Aiming to Broaden AI Accessibility.

Featherless.ai positions itself as a provider of affordable and scalable AI infrastructure, emphasizing accessibility in both established and emerging markets. According to Founder and CEO Eugene Cheah, AI’s potential is often limited by cost and infrastructure constraints, which can create barriers for smaller businesses and individuals. Featherless.ai seeks to address these challenges by enabling instant access to open-source AI models without the need for extensive computing resources.

Platform Offerings and Pricing Model.

The platform currently provides access to over 4,000 open-source AI models, including popular choices like DeepSeek and LLaMA, with plans to onboard additional models weekly. A flat capacity pricing model is designed to provide cost predictability and scalability, potentially benefiting businesses that require dynamic AI workloads without concerns over variable fees.

For casual AI users, the company offers a low-cost entry plan at $10 per month, providing access to models without requiring high-end GPUs. Meanwhile, enterprise users can leverage the platform’s dynamic scaling capabilities, aimed at optimizing costs while supporting large-scale AI deployments.

Technological Advancements and Infrastructure.

With its recent funding, Featherless.ai is focusing on reducing AI inference costs through research into next-generation AI architectures. The company’s infrastructure is designed to enable seamless multilingual support across 100+ languages while maintaining consistent performance—an area where some AI models have historically faced challenges.

A key technological development is proprietary hot-swapping technology, which allows AI models to be switched in under 5 seconds, a significant reduction compared to the 30-minute loading times typically associated with standard GPUs. This capability has the potential to improve GPU utilization, minimize downtime, and lower operational costs for businesses leveraging AI at scale.

Featherless.ai is also contributing to the RWKV foundation model project, an open-source AI model under the Linux Foundation, with the goal of expanding cross-platform AI deployment.

Investor Perspectives.

Featherless.ai’s approach has drawn interest from investors who see its serverless AI infrastructure as a potential solution to the rising costs of AI deployment.

• Vishal Harnal, Managing Partner at 500 Global, highlighted that computing costs remain a key hurdle in AI scalability, emphasizing Featherless.ai’s focus on making AI deployment more cost-effective for businesses globally.
• Yuichiro Hikosaka, Principal at Airbus Ventures, pointed to inefficiencies in existing AI model architectures, particularly around multilingual performance, and sees Featherless.ai’s platform as a way to address these limitations.
• Chee-We Ng, Managing Partner at Oakseed Ventures, noted the growing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) across industries and positioned Featherless.ai as a key enabler for AI experimentation and adoption.

Leadership and Future Direction.

Featherless.ai was co-founded by Eugene Cheah (CEO), Harrison Vanderbyl (CTO), and Wesley George (COO), who collectively bring 30 years of experience in software development and engineering leadership.

With its latest funding round, the company plans to expand AI model availability, improve cost efficiency, and enhance infrastructure capabilities, contributing to broader adoption of open-source AI technologies.