Ayala’s ACTIVE Fund invests in Featherless.ai startup

Featherless.ai Founder and CEO Eugene Cheah

MANILA, Philippines – The Ayala Corporate Technology Innovation Venture (ACTIVE) Fund, managed by Kickstart Ventures, the Philippines’ largest venture capital firm, has invested in Featherless.ai, the leading serverless AI inference platform, to help remove barriers to AI adoption.

“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.

AI is expected to boost the Philippine economy by 12 percent in 2030, but AI integration at the organizational level is limited due to high investment costs. Even for casual users, barriers are high for non-English users.

Co-founded by Cheah and Harrison Vanderbyl who bring combined experience of 30 years building software and leading engineering team, Featherless.ai provides instant and affordable access to the world’s largest collection of open-source AI models.

Its breakthrough innovation optimizes GPU utilization and eliminates costly downtime to enable AI inference at significantly lower costs.

With over 4,000 models, including popular options like DeepSeek, LLama, and continuously onboarding new models every week, Featherless.ai offers a flat capacity pricing model and AI workload scaling that ensures cost predictability and scalability.