Ayala Corp.’s Active Fund, managed by Kickstart Ventures, has invested in Featherless.ai to help make AI more accessible and affordable. Featherless.ai is a serverless AI inference platform that allows businesses and individuals to use AI models at lower costs.
“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 CEO of Featherless.ai.
The high cost of AI adoption has limited its use in the Philippines, especially for organizations. AI is expected to contribute 12% to the country’s economy by 2030, but many businesses struggle with expensive infrastructure. Non-English users also face challenges in accessing AI tools.
Featherless.ai, co-founded by Cheah and Harrison Vanderbyl, offers a solution by providing access to over 4,000 open-source AI models, including DeepSeek and LLama. The company’s technology optimizes GPU usage to lower costs and eliminate downtime. It offers a predictable pricing model that allows businesses to scale AI workloads without unexpected expenses.
“With this investment, Featherless.ai will expand its support for AI modalities such as embeddings, vision, and speech,” said Joan Yao, general partner at Kickstart Ventures. “We believe in Featherless.ai’s mission to make AI cheaper and more accessible through technology that lowers inference costs.”
The company is also working on next-generation AI architectures that will reduce reliance on expensive GPUs. It contributes to the open-source RWKV foundation model project, the first AI model under the Linux Foundation. The project aims to develop AI that can run on lower-cost hardware and support multiple languages.
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