Felis

The Felis are basically large sophont cats who walk on all fours and interact with the world via a grasping apparatus that they strap to their backs. Fiercely mercantile and competitive, their society is defined by corporate interests and libertarian values that lead them to be intensely skeptical of and resistant to the Federal paradigm represented by the United Federation of Planets and the Harmony of Horizon, the two major powers working to court them. The Felis were originally uplifted by an unknown species in the distant past, which goes a long way towards explaining how they climbed to the stars without opposable thumbs.