Former Meta CFO Joins AI Startup Fireworks AI: Annualized Revenue Tops $1 Billion, Valuation Eyes $30 Billion

Beating AI News Flash: Former Meta CFO and Chief Strategy Officer Dave Wehner has announced his departure to join AI inference platform Fireworks AI as Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

Wehner joined Facebook in 2012, was promoted to CFO in 2014, and transitioned to Chief Strategy Officer in 2022. He spent 14 years at Meta and participated in the company's transformation from a social networking giant to the metaverse and AI.

Fireworks AI was founded by former Meta AI infrastructure head Lin Qiao and mainly helps enterprises deploy, run, and customize open-source AI models. For example, enterprises can use their own business data to train specialized models and then provide API services through Fireworks, without having to develop a full AI infrastructure from scratch.

The company just completed a $1.505 billion Series D funding round in July this year, reaching a valuation of $17.5 billion. Fireworks disclosed at the time that its annualized revenue had exceeded $1 billion, processing more than 40 trillion tokens per day, of which more than 95% came from customer-customized models.

Fireworks plans to launch a new funding round next week, targeting a valuation of at least $30 billion. If it reaches this goal, the valuation will rise by about 71% in less than four months.

Fireworks has also recently been strengthening its management team. In October, it hired former Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Janel Thamkul as founding General Counsel, responsible for legal, government, and regulatory affairs. Now it is also welcoming Wehner, who once managed Meta's finances.

Wehner said he saw the huge opportunity in enterprise AI at Meta. He believes enterprises will increasingly use their own data and expertise to build specialized models, and called AI the most important technological change he has witnessed in his lifetime.