AYALA Corporate Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund, which is managed by Kickstart Ventures, is investing in artificial intelligence (AI) platform Featherless.AI to help bridge the AI adoption gap among Philippine organizations.
“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 in a statement on Tuesday.
“We believe in [Featherless.AI’s] mission of democratizing access to AI [by] 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,” she added.
Philippine businesses are hard pressed to integrate AI in their operations to boost productivity and sales. However, many struggle with high investment costs and language barriers.
Featherless.AI enables businesses to scale AI use without unexpected charges or rate limits. It offers a flat capacity pricing model and AI workload scaling that ensures cost predictability and scalability.
Co-founded by Eugene Cheah and Harrison Vanderbyl, Featherless.AI provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models.
The startup has more than 4,000 AI models including popular options like DeepSeek and LLama and is onboarding new models weekly.
With the latest funding, the company seeks to support all major AI modalities including embedding, 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 (graphics processing units) for as low as $10 (P573) a month.
Under its new funding, Featherless.AI will also advance research into next-generation AI architectures that can dramatically lower inference costs. This would help make AI deployment possible on lower cost hardware instead of requiring high-end GPUs.
“I don’t want a future where AI is controlled by the few,” Mr. Cheah, who also serves as the startup’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. “I want to empower individuals globally.”
The Philippine economy could generate more than P2 trillion each year if businesses in the country adopt AI, the National Economic and Development Authority said last year. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz