Dave Wenner meta The company’s chief strategy officer will leave the company and join 4-year-old AI startup Fireworks.
Wenner will take on the role of CFO at Fireworks, an AI inference and model training platform focused on open models that was valued at $17.5 billion in a Series D funding round in July, the company announced on Friday’s X.
Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said in a statement to CNBC that Wenner will be tasked with expanding the company’s finances and operations.
“Fireworks has the right mission at the moment,” Wehner wrote of X, adding: “I’m becoming increasingly bullish on what they’re building. There’s an incredible wealth of technical talent here, combined with a very hands-on focus on what customers need.”
AI startup founded in 2022 with ex-Meta google is a platform that allows developers to customize and run open models for businesses. The company’s latest investment round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, but Fireworks is also backed by: Nvidia and Sequoia Capital. Business Insider reported that the company is in early talks to raise money again at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion.
Wenner joined Meta (then known as Facebook) in 2012 and served as the company’s chief financial officer from 2014 to 2022.
“Dave has helped Meta navigate incredible growth and complexity over 14 years, bringing a disciplined mindset to some of our most difficult enterprise-level decisions,” Meta COO Javier Oliván said in a statement to CNBC.
Fireworks is noticeably smaller than Meta (which had a market cap of about $1.56 trillion as of Friday’s close) and competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Dave told me he wanted to go back to a small company where he could build a big impact again,” Fireworks’ Lin wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday. “He sees AI as the defining technology change in his life and wants to help shape what comes next.”
The company’s size is not immune to the risks and complexities often associated with AI technology. In October, the company said in a press release that it discovered “a security incident involving the unauthorized use of Fireworks internal credentials,” which resulted in “an unauthorized third party accessing environment variables used in assessment jobs for a limited number of customer accounts.”
“Based on our current investigation, we have not detected any evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information, or inference traffic within Fireworks’ security perimeter or controls,” the release states.
