Meta Strategy Chief Dave Wehner Departs for AI Startup Fireworks as CFO

Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner is leaving the company to become CFO of Fireworks, a four-year-old AI startup focused on inference and model training for open models. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday.

Fireworks was valued at $17.5 billion in a Series D round in July led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, and is backed by Nvidia and Sequoia Capital. Business Insider reported the company is in early talks to raise again at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation. CEO Lin Qiao said Wehner will be tasked with scaling the company's finances and operations.

Wehner joined Meta, then Facebook, in 2012 and served as CFO from 2014 to 2022. COO Javier Olivan credited him with guiding Meta through 14 years of growth and bringing disciplined thinking to hard company-level decisions. In a LinkedIn post, Lin said Wehner wanted to return to a smaller company where he could build toward big impact, seeing AI as the defining technology shift of his lifetime.

Fireworks, founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, lets developers customize and run open models for their businesses. It is far smaller than Meta and competes with OpenAI and Anthropic. In October, the company disclosed a security incident in which an unauthorized third party accessed environment variables used in evaluation jobs in a limited number of customer accounts; it said its investigation had found no evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information or inference traffic.

Source: CNBC