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AI inference infrastructure

Featherless.ai

Featherless.ai provides serverless AI inference, letting developers run open models without managing the underlying infrastructure. As of August 2026, its catalog offers 40,000+ models through one API key, supporting uses such as coding, reasoning, multilingual applications and creative writing. Individuals can use an interactive chat subscription, developers can build applications with usage-based inference, and businesses can choose dedicated GPUs with engineering support. The company also offers a managed runtime for open-source agents, starting with OpenClaw.

The company’s co-founders are CEO Eugene Cheah, CTO Harrison Vanderbyl and Wesley George. Originally operating as Recursal.AI, it adopted the Featherless.AI identity in 2025. Its research includes RADLADS, a method for converting pretrained transformers to alternative attention architectures without training from scratch. The process aligns hidden states, distills model outputs and fine-tunes for long contexts; Featherless used it to train the attention-free QRWKV-72B model with eight GPUs. This research complements its work on inference, model and workflow optimization.

In April 2026, the company reported more than 10,000 customers and monthly revenue above $250,000 but below $500,000—an annualized revenue run rate above $3 million. It announced a $20 million Series A that month, co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, to expand infrastructure, model access and enterprise deployments.

featherless.ai ↗

2 talks

Newest first

2 speakers at AIE

Affiliations reflect their AIE appearances, not necessarily current employment.

EugeneEugene CheahCo-founder and chief executive of Featherless

Start here

  1. WTF do people use Open Models for??

    Start here for a survey of practical open-model applications and an introduction to future memory-oriented linear-transformer architectures.

    Eugene CheahAI Engineer Summit 2025

  2. The Next Unicorns: 7 Top AI startups from the HF0 Residency

    Use this shared showcase for context on the startup applications presented alongside Featherless.ai, including creative tools, enterprise data, voice models, and model routing.

    Diego Rodriguez · Eugene · Jonas Bauer · Shijia Liao · David Vorick · Alex AtallahAI Engineer World's Fair 2025

Messages from the stage

Enterprise adoption favors stable deployments

Eugene Cheah contrasts individual interest in DeepSeek-R1, Llama, and Qwen with enterprise reliance on stable, permissively licensed Mistral NeMo deployments. The talk connects model selection with token consumption and production reliability.

Affiliations reflect each recorded session, not necessarily current employment. The HF0 showcase's presenter identities and conference-session match are flagged for review in the supplied summary. The open-model talk summary notes an unidentified speaking cluster near the closing segment.

Company sources · checked 2026-08-27