Featherless.ai banks $20M Series A to scale open-source AI inference

Enterprise AI has consolidated around closed APIs and proprietary cloud stacks. A second wave is now moving toward open models that companies can audit, fine-tune and own, but the underlying question of who actually runs them, on what hardware, and at what price, has stayed unsolved.

Featherless.ai, founded in 2023 by Eugene Cheah (CEO), Harrison Vanderbyl (CTO) and Wesley George (COO), all from the team behind RWKV, the attention-free architecture that became the first foundation-model project hosted by the Linux Foundation, is the serverless inference layer built for that question. One API key gives developers access to more than 30,000 open models spanning language, vision and audio, while Featherless takes care of the GPU substrate underneath: where the model lives, when it loads, how it scales, and which subscription tier the customer pays for instead of metered tokens.

The company has just closed a $20M Series A, co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures and Wavemaker Ventures participating, on top of a $5M seed raised in 2025. The capital is split across geographic infrastructure rollout, a curated marketplace for domain-specific open models, and broader hardware support so that customers are not locked into a single chip vendor.

Sources: Featherless.ai | Betakit

Founders: Eugene Cheah, Harrison Vanderbyl, Wesley George