Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner is leaving the company to become the chief financial officer of Fireworks, an AI infrastructure startup. The move follows a July Series D fundraising round that valued the four-year-old company at $17.5 billion. Fireworks, which was founded in 2022 by former employees of Meta and Google, provides a platform for developers to customize and run open models for business use.
Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company's operations and finances. In a post on X, Wehner said, "I've become increasingly bullish on what they are building." He noted the company possesses significant technical talent and a practical focus on customer needs.
Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 and served as the company's chief financial officer from 2014 to 2022. Meta COO Javier Olivan said Wehner helped guide the company through 14 years of growth and complexity, contributing disciplined thinking to major company-level decisions.
Fireworks is backed by Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV. While the startup is significantly smaller than Meta, which holds a $1.56 trillion market capitalization, Business Insider reported the company is in early discussions to raise new funds at a valuation between $30 billion and $40 billion.
The company previously reported a security incident in October involving the unauthorized use of internal credentials. Fireworks stated that a third party accessed environment variables in a limited number of customer accounts, though the company found no evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, or personal information.
