Featherless, a neutral infrastructure platform for open-source AI models, has raised a $20 million Series A co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with significant participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures. The capital will support global footprint expansion, deeper technical integrations, enterprise deployments, and advancement of the company’s open-source agent runtime.
Featherless is the fastest-growing inference partner in the Hugging Face ecosystem, serving more than 30,000 open models across language, vision, audio, and multimodal use cases. The company’s AI optimization stack combines inference, model, and workflow optimization to deliver performance and cost efficiency across a library of models it describes as otherwise difficult to run at scale. Through a strategic partnership with AMD, the platform ensures leading open-source models run natively on AMD’s ROCm platform, providing hardware diversity as an alternative to closed ecosystems.
The company’s founding team created RWKV, one of the most significant open-source model architectures, and continues foundational model research through Recursal Labs. Featherless operates EU and U.S. infrastructure with a founding team spanning Canada, Singapore, and Australia.
KEY QUOTE:
“AI is concentrating in a few countries, a few companies, a few chips. The models most teams depend on are controlled by a handful of labs. The compute to run them is controlled by even fewer. Open-source is the only real check on that, and it only works if the infrastructure to run it actually exists. Featherless was built to open it up for the many.”
Featherless statement
