Featherless.ai, a Singapore co-founded artificial intelligence (AI) firm, has secured $20 million in Series A funding co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures.
Featherless.ai said in a statement on Thursday that the funding round also saw 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 specialized open models and deepen its technical integration with diverse hardware architectures to continue driving down the cost of AI inference.
“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,” said Eugene Cheah, Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of Featherless.ai.
“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,” he added.
Currently, 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 said the firm is meeting a critical demand for sovereign AI, to respect jurisdictional boundaries and data privacy.
Through a strategic collaboration with AMD, Featherless.ai said it 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 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,” said Sagi Paz, Head of AMD Ventures.
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’, the firm provides developers with the creative flexibility to build the next generation of applications.
It is noted the firm’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
“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,” said Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures.
Abby Hitchcock, Principal at Airbus Ventures, said the next phase of AI adoption will be driven by millions of specialised, fine-tuned models rather than a few general-purpose systems.
She said the key challenge is not the availability of such models, but the ability to serve them reliably and cost-effectively at scale. Featherless.ai has addressed this by enabling models to load within seconds while maintaining high GPU utilization, making broader commercial deployment viable.
Hitchcock added that the firm’s confidence in the company has strengthened since its initial investment, and it is supporting its next phase of growth.
Joan Yao, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures, also said the firm backed Featherless.ai at seed because of their technical edge in inference, and this round reinforces their conviction that they’re building something durable in an increasingly competitive space.
Prashant Matta, Managing Partner at Panache Ventures, said Featherless.ai combines practical innovation with a broader mission to diversify the AI ecosystem.
He warned that the industry risks being dominated by a small number of players from a single country, adding that platforms like Featherless.ai offer an alternative path for development.
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