Ayala venture firm pushes greater access to AI
As more companies and individuals integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their daily tasks, venture capital firm Ayala Corporate Technology Innovation Venture (Active) Fund has invested in a “serverless” platform to enable better access to the emerging technology.
Active Fund, which is managed by Kickstart Ventures, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had invested in Featherless.ai, which provides access to open source AI models. It did not specify other details, including its total investment value.
“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.
For its part, Featherless.ai said it would use Active Fund’s investment to advance research into next-generation AI systems that can “dramatically lower inference costs.”
These refer to expenses related to using a trained AI model to make predictions or generate output from new data.
According to IBM, AI inferencing can be costly due to its extensive use of power, as well as its carbon emissions.
Compared with investing in AI training, which is a one-time cost, IBM said investments in inferencing were always ongoing.
‘Costly downtime’
Active Fund pointed out that Featherless.ai eliminated “costly downtime” to enable AI inferencing at “significantly lower costs.” Its AI models include DeepSeek and Llama.
“AI is already transforming industries at an unprecedented pace … I don’t want a future where AI is controlled by the few. I want to empower individuals globally,” Featherless.ai founder and CEO Eugene Cheah said.
In its 2025 Global CEO Survey, PwC found that 75 percent of top executives from the Philippines trust having AI “embedded into key business processes.”
This is higher than the global average of 67 percent, implying that Philippine companies have a higher level of confidence in the potential of AI to enhance operations, PwC said in its report.
However, Filipino CEOs are also observing a skills gap when it comes to technological advancement, making it difficult to fully adapt AI.
