Featherless.ai Raises $20M to Build Open-Source AI Infrastructure Free From Big Tech Control

Featherless.ai, a platform for deploying open-source AI models, has raised $20 million in Series A funding co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.

The company supports over 30,000 open models across language, vision, and audio, positioning itself as a hardware-neutral alternative to proprietary cloud ecosystems. Its founding team created RWKV, an open-source AI architecture designed to challenge transformer dominance. Infrastructure is hosted across the U.S. and EU to meet sovereign AI and data privacy requirements.

Proceeds will fund global infrastructure expansion, a specialized open model marketplace, and deeper integration with diverse hardware including AMD’s ROCm platform. CEO Eugene Cheah said the raise signals a shift toward enterprises owning rather than renting their AI foundations.

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