Startup profile · funding coverage
Featherless AI funding, valuation and investors
Open-model inference platform founded by researchers associated with the RWKV recurrent-model architecture.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Series A
$20M · April 30, 2026
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$20M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
series a · San Francisco, California, United States
Investors in latest funding
Lead: AMD Ventures , Airbus Ventures
Other: BMW i Ventures , Kickstart Ventures , Panache Ventures , Wavemaker Ventures
Overview
Featherless AI, formerly Recursal.AI, provides serverless inference for open-weight AI models. Co-founders Eugene Cheah, Harrison Vanderbyl and Wesley George are associated with the RWKV project. Featherless announced a $20M Series A on April 30, 2026, co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, to expand inference infrastructure, AMD ROCm integrations and model availability. The company has not disclosed a commercial NCM implementation.
Why Featherless AI is interesting
Combines research contributions around RWKV with commercial inference and hardware optimization. Its business is relevant to efficient AI economics, but should not be presented as a direct NCM competitor.
Product & use cases
Serverless inference for a broad library of open models, plus optimization and deployment tools including AMD ROCm support.
- Hosted APIs for open-weight models
- Low-operations model deployment
- Open-source AI agents and sovereign model hosting
Key facts
- $20M Series A announced April 30, 2026
- Co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures
- RWKV research connection; no public NCM adoption
Funding history (newest first)
Series A
2026-04-30 $20M- AMD Ventures (lead)
- Airbus Ventures (lead)
- BMW i Ventures (participant)
- Kickstart Ventures (participant)
- Panache Ventures (participant)
- Wavemaker Ventures (participant)
Source: Read source · featherless.ai
Competitive landscape
Edge: Broad model support and low-overhead inference systems coupled with recurrent-model research roots.
Competitive economics depend on hardware utilization, per-task reliability and customer adoption, not just claimed inference latency.
Market / IPO context
Editorial / static context — not a live quote.
FAQs about Featherless AI
Practical answers founders, operators, and investors typically search for.
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Editorial note: AI tools assisted with research, structure, or drafting. Venture Capital Tracker retains human editorial responsibility for factual accuracy, relevance, and source quality before publication.