Meta Strategy Chief Dave Wehner Leaves to Become CFO of AI Inference Start-Up Fireworks

The Information first reported the move on Friday, and Wehner confirmed it in a post on X the same day. Meta and Fireworks had not issued statements on the appointment.

Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning and became chief financial officer in 2014, steering the company's finances through its expansion into a global advertising business and its rebranding as Meta. He moved to the newly created chief strategy officer role in November 2022, when Susan Li succeeded him as CFO.

The hire gives Fireworks a finance chief who ran the books at one of the world's largest public companies, the kind of experience start-ups typically seek as they prepare for heavier fundraising or an eventual listing. Fireworks has not said it plans to go public.

Fireworks, led by co-founder and chief executive Lin Qiao, raised $1.5 billion in a Series D round in July at a $17.5 billion valuation, according to SiliconANGLE. Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV led that round, and Nvidia also took part. The company said at the time that its annualised revenue had passed $1 billion. The valuation came nine months after a Series C at $4 billion.

The company runs a platform on which developers fine-tune open-source models on managed GPU clusters and pay by usage, alongside serverless and dedicated inference services. Customers include Samsung Electronics and GitLab.

Inference, the work of running trained models to answer queries, has become one of the most heavily funded corners of AI infrastructure as companies move from experimenting with models to deploying them at scale. Rival Groq is seeking an $8 billion valuation in a new round.

Wehner's start date at Fireworks has not been disclosed, and Meta has not said who will take over his strategy responsibilities.