The Ayala Corporate Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund, managed by Kickstart Ventures Inc., has invested in serverless artificial intelligence (AI) inference platform Featherless.ai at an undisclosed amount.
The companies in a joint statement on Tuesday said the investment will help remove barriers to AI adoption such as high investment costs and accessibility, especially for non-English speakers, as many AI tools are primarily optimized for English.
Kickstart Ventures is a corporate venture capital (CVC) firm wholly owned by Globe Telecom.
Kickstart Ventures said Featherless.ai has over 4,000 AI models 4,000 models, including popular options like DeepSeek, LLama, and continuously onboarding new models every week that enable businesses to scale AI usage without unexpected charges or rate limits.
It said the latest funding will support the expansion of AI modalities including embeddings, vision, and speech while advancing cost-efficient architectures for deployment on affordable hardware.
With the latest funding, Featherless.ai said it plans to support all major AI modalities — including embeddings, vision, and speech.
Casual AI users can access a wide range of the latest open-source models without the need for expensive high-end graphic processing units (GPUs) with a low entry point of just $10 per month, it said.
Featherless.ai said it provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models enabling users to optimize GPU utilization and eliminates costly downtime for AI inference at significantly lower costs.
With the funding, Featherless.ai said it will also advance research into next-generation AI architectures that can dramatically lower inference costs, making AI deployment feasible on lower cost hardware rather than requiring high-end GPUs.
“AI is already transforming industries at an unprecedented pace. This is the most important technological shift since the World Wide Web. I don’t want a future where AI is controlled by the few. I want to empower individuals globally,” said Eugene Cheah, founder and chief executive officer of Featherless.ai.
Featherless.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, California and was co-founded by Eugene Cheah and Harrison Vanderbyl who bring combined experience of 30 years building software and leading engineering team
