Meta Chief Strategy Officer Dave Wehner is leaving the company to become the chief financial officer of AI startup Fireworks. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday, joining the four-year-old company which provides a platform for AI inference and model training focused on open models. At Fireworks, Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company’s finances and operations, according to Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao.
Wehner’s New Role at Fireworks
Wehner’s transition to Firemarks comes as the AI startup was valued at $17.5 billion during a Series D fundraising round in July. “Fireworks has the right mission for the moment,” Wehner wrote on X, adding: “I’ve become increasingly bullish on what they are building. There’s a remarkable depth of technical talent here, coupled with a very practical focus on what customers need.” The company, founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, lets developers customize and run open models for their businesses and is backed by investors including Nvidia and Sequoia Capital.
Background at Meta
Wehner joined Meta, then called Facebook, in 2012 and served as the company’s chief financial officer from 2014 to 2022. “Dave helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and brought disciplined thinking to some of our hardest company-level decisions,” Meta COO Javier Olivan said in a statement to CNBC. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao noted that Wehner wanted to return to a smaller company where he could make a significant impact. “He sees AI as the defining technology shift of his lifetime and wants to help shape what comes next,” Lin wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Fireworks’ Position and Recent Challenges
Fireworks competes with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. While the AI startup is significantly smaller than Meta—which has a market capitalization of about $1.56 trillion as of Friday’s close—it is reportedly in early talks to raise funds again at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation. The company has also faced recent challenges, including a security incident in October involving unauthorized use of internal credentials, though Fireworks stated it found no evidence of access to customer models, datasets, or personal information.
