Former Meta CFO joins AI upstart Fireworks AI, which has annual revenue exceeding $1 billion and is targeting a $30 billion valuation.

News Flash from Beating AI: Dave Wehner, former CFO and Chief Strategy Officer of Meta, 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 shifted to the role of Chief Strategy Officer in 2022. He spent 14 years at Meta, participating in the company’s transformation from a social media giant to the metaverse and AI sectors. Fireworks AI was founded by Lin Qiao, former head of Meta’s AI Infrastructure, and helps enterprises deploy, run, and customize open-source AI models. For instance, companies can train custom models using their own business data, then access API services via Fireworks without building an entire AI infrastructure from scratch. The company closed a $1.505 billion Series D financing round in July this year, reaching a valuation of $17.5 billion. Fireworks disclosed at the time that its annualized revenue had exceeded $10 billion, processing over 40 trillion tokens daily, with more than 95% coming from client custom models. Fireworks plans to launch a new financing round next week, targeting a valuation of at least $30 billion. If achieved, this would represent a roughly 71% increase in valuation in less than four months. Fireworks has also been strengthening its management team recently: in October, it hired Janel Thamkul, former Deputy General Counsel of Anthropic, as Founding General Counsel, responsible for legal, government, and regulatory affairs. Now, it has welcomed Wehner, who previously oversaw Meta’s finances. Wehner noted that he saw massive opportunities in enterprise AI during his tenure at Meta, believing that enterprises will increasingly leverage their own data and expertise to build custom models, calling AI the most significant technological transformation he has witnessed in his lifetime.