Meta’s chief strategy officer, Dave Wehner, announced on X that he will leave the social-media giant to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, an AI infrastructure startup. The transition was confirmed on Friday, and the move marks Wehner’s shift from a trillion-dollar corporation to a venture valued at billions.
Fireworks, founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google staff, provides a platform for developers to customize and run open-source models in production. The company secured a Series D round in July that placed its valuation at $17.5 billion, with lead investors Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, while Nvidia and Sequoia Capital also hold stakes.
Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said Wehner will be responsible for expanding the firm’s financial and operational capabilities. In a statement to CNBC, Qiao emphasized the need for disciplined growth as the startup scales its inference and model-training services. Wehner echoed the sentiment on X, noting the company’s deep technical talent and customer-centric approach.
Wehner joined Meta, then known as Facebook, in 2012 and served as chief financial officer from 2014 through 2022. During his tenure he oversaw periods of rapid expansion and complex regulatory challenges. Meta’s chief operating officer Javier Olivan praised Wehner’s disciplined thinking in guiding the company through “tremendous growth and complexity” over fourteen years.
Compared with Meta’s market capitalization of roughly $1.56 trillion, Fireworks remains a much smaller player, competing with firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative-AI space. Lin Qiao explained that Wehner sought a more intimate environment where he could drive impact, describing AI as the defining technological shift of his career.
In October, Fireworks disclosed a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal credentials that affected a limited set of customer accounts. The company’s press release stated that investigations found no evidence of illicit access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information, or inference traffic within its security perimeter.