THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Dave Wehner, who joined Facebook in 2012 and was its CFO from 2014 to 2022, is leaving his role as Meta's chief strategy officer to become CFO of Fireworks, CNBC reported on 7 November.
  • Fireworks, which runs and customises open models for developers, raised a $1.505 billion Series D in July at a $17.5 billion valuation and says it passed $1 billion in annualised revenue.
  • Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao wrote that Wehner wanted to return to a smaller company; AI Weekly reports Fireworks is in early talks to raise at a higher valuation.

Dave Wehner, Meta's chief strategy officer and previously its chief financial officer, is leaving the company to become CFO of Fireworks, a start-up that sells AI inference infrastructure. The move was first reported by CNBC on 7 November and has been picked up by TechBuzz and AI Weekly, whose accounts this article relies on.

A long run at Meta

According to AI Weekly, Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 in corporate finance and business planning, became CFO in 2014 and held the post until 2022. Meta announced in July 2022 that Susan Li would take over as CFO and that Wehner would become chief strategy officer from 1 November that year, overseeing strategy and corporate development. TechBuzz credits him with steering the company's finances through a period of rapid growth, product pivots and heavy spending on Reality Labs. His departure ends roughly 14 years at the company.

Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao explained the hire in a LinkedIn post cited by AI Weekly: she wrote that Wehner had told her he wanted to go back to a smaller company where he could again build towards a large impact. No start date or details of his responsibilities beyond the CFO title were given in the reports reviewed here, nor did they say who will take over his strategy role at Meta.

What Fireworks does

Founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, Fireworks offers a cloud platform on which developers fine-tune and run open-source models, with serverless inference and dedicated GPU deployments billed by usage. In July the company announced a $1.505 billion Series D led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia, Lightspeed and others participating, at a $17.5 billion valuation. It said at the time that its annualised revenue run rate had passed $1 billion and that it served more than 40 trillion tokens a day, naming Cursor and Harvey among its customers.

Reading the move

Hiring a seasoned public-company CFO is often read as a step towards an eventual listing, and both TechBuzz and AI Weekly offer that interpretation; neither Fireworks nor Wehner has announced any such plan. AI Weekly also reports that Fireworks is in early talks to raise money at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion, a claim that has not been confirmed by the company. Fireworks competes with the inference services of large cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services as well as with other specialised inference start-ups.