The Ayala Corporate Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund, managed by Kickstart Ventures, the Philippines’ largest venture capital firm, announced its investment in Featherless.ai, the leading serverless AI inference platform, to help remove barriers to AI adoption.
“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,” says Eugene Cheah, founder and CEO of Featherless.ai.
AI is expected to boost the Philippine economy by 12% in 2030, but AI integration at the organizational level is limited due to high investment costs. Even for casual users, barriers are high for non-English users.
Co-founded by Eugene Cheah and Harrison Vanderbyl, who bring a combined experience of 30 years building software and leading engineering team, Featherless.ai provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models. Its breakthrough innovation optimizes GPU utilization and eliminates costly downtime to enable AI inference at significantly lower costs.
With over 4,000 models, including popular options like DeepSeek, LLama, and continuously onboarding new models every week, Featherless.ai offers a flat capacity pricing model and AI workload scaling that ensures cost predictability and scalability.
Businesses can dynamically scale AI usage without unexpected charges or rate limits, and focus on running experiments to develop, test, and fine-tune their models. With the latest funding, the company has 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 GPUs with a low entry point of just USD10 per month.
“One of the ACTIVE Fund’s core investment theses around the Future of Work is that technologies like AI can augment human productivity,” Kickstart Ventures general partner Joan Yao said. “We believe in Recursal’s mission of democratizing access to AI – making it cheaper for both enterprises and individuals to run the latest open-source models through technology that optimizes GPU utilization costs and lowering inference costs.”
Maximizing the new funding, Featherless.ai 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.
The team is also actively involved in the development of the open-source RWKV foundation model project, the first AI model under the Linux Foundation, which has been deployed on Windows to billions of devices. This effort is also part of their broader commitment to develop better and more accessible AI models across languages and reduce the reliance on closed-source models from major tech companies.