Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner is leaving to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, CNBC reported on 7 November. The move takes a former Meta finance chief to an open-model inference company valued at $17.5 billion in July, where its CEO says he will help scale finances and operations.
Key points
- Wehner is leaving Meta’s strategy chief role to become Fireworks’ CFO.
- He was Meta’s CFO from 2014 to 2022.
- Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in July at a $17.5 billion post-money valuation.
- The company is in early talks about another raise at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation, Business Insider reported.
Wehner returns to a finance role
Wehner announced his move on X on 6 November, MLQ.ai reported. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said in a statement to CNBC that Wehner will work on scaling the company’s finances and operations.
Wehner joined Facebook, as Meta was then called, in 2012. He served as CFO from 2014 to 2022, before moving from the finance post to company-wide strategy.
Susan Li succeeded him as CFO in November 2022, when Wehner became Meta’s first chief strategy officer, MLQ.ai reported. His new job puts him back in charge of finance, this time at a company built around running and adapting AI models for businesses.
Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in July
Founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, Fireworks offers businesses a platform for customising and running open models. It also provides model training, placing Wehner’s new employer in the infrastructure market serving companies that want to deploy AI.
Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in a Series D at a $17.5 billion post-money valuation in July, MLQ.ai reported. Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV led the round. Nvidia and Sequoia Capital also back the company.
Business Insider reported that Fireworks has begun preliminary discussions about another funding round that could value it at $30 billion to $40 billion. Another company in the inference market, Fal, raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, AI Affairs reported.
Fireworks reported an October security incident
Fireworks said in October that it had discovered unauthorised use of its internal credentials, CNBC reported, describing a company release. The company said a third party accessed environment variables used in evaluation jobs for a limited number of customer accounts.
Fireworks said its investigation found no evidence of anyone without permission reaching clients’ models, data collections, material used to train models, private details about individuals or inference requests within its security perimeter or control.
