Featherless.ai raises $20M to expand open-source AI infrastructure and services

Featherless.ai, a platform supporting open-source AI, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round included participation from AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, alongside other investors, and represents a milestone in the company’s development.

The company, which positions itself as a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments, plans to use the funding to expand its global infrastructure. This includes developing a marketplace for specialised open models and extending technical integrations across a range of hardware architectures with the aim of reducing AI inference costs.

Featherless.ai is currently a growing Hugging Face inference partner and supports over 30,000 open models spanning language, vision, and audio applications. The platform is designed as a neutral infrastructure layer, not aligned with specific hyperscalers, chipmakers, or proprietary ecosystems. Its infrastructure is hosted in both the US and EU to support requirements around data jurisdiction and privacy.

A key focus for the company is hardware diversity. Through collaboration with AMD, Featherless.ai enables open-source models to run on the AMD ROCm™ software platform, providing an alternative to proprietary hardware environments.

The company also aims to support broader access to AI models outside closed ecosystems. Its founding team previously developed RWKV, an open-source architecture intended as an alternative to transformer-based models.

With this funding, Featherless.ai intends to further scale its infrastructure and continue development of its platform for deploying and running open-source AI models at scale.