Airbus Ventures Invests in Featherless.ai to Democratize Access to Open Source AI Models

Airbus Ventures announces its investment in Featherless.ai, the leading serverless AI inference platform. Featherless.ai’s breakthrough innovation optimizes GPU utilization, eliminates costly downtime, and dramatically reduces operational costs, enabling Featherless.ai to offer AI inference at significantly lower costs.

“AI has the power to transform industries and empower individuals around the globe. However, accessing and utilizing a diverse range of models can be cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging for many users, particularly those in emerging markets, where there’s no shortage of demand for AI solutions,” remarks Eugene Cheah, Founder, and CEO. “Featherless.ai is changing the game by providing a straightforward, affordable, scalable solution for using open source AI models in production.”

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Featherless.ai provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models. With over 4,000 models – and continuously onboarding new models every week – Featherless.ai offers a flat capacity pricing model that ensures cost predictability and scalability. Through this model, businesses can dynamically scale AI usage without worrying about unexpected charges or rate limits and instead focusing energies 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.

“Our research into foundational model development revealed that while much of the AI industry has focused on scaling existing Transformer models, fundamental inefficiencies in the architecture have remained unaddressed. As most foundational models struggle to maintain performance across multiple languages, creating accessibility barriers in global markets, these structural inefficiencies have threatened to stifle competition and innovation across the broader global ecosystem,” explains Yuichiro Hikosaka, Airbus Ventures Principal, based in Tokyo. “Now enter Featherless.ai – a serverless platform that empowers users to run, test, and fine-tune the latest models seamlessly and affordably. Featherless.ai is ready and primed to address a global market.”

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One of the goals for the company is advancing 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 research and development of the open-source RWKV foundation model project, the first AI model under the Linux Foundation, which has notably been deployed on 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.

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