Meta’s Chief Strategy Officer David Wehner to become Fireworks CFO — CNBC
Meta Chief Strategy Officer David Wehner is leaving the company to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, a startup developing infrastructure for artificial intelligence. CNBC reports the personnel change. Wehner announced his appointment on social network X on Friday.
New role at Fireworks
At Fireworks, Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company’s financial and operational processes, startup CEO Lin Qiao told CNBC. Wehner himself said he considers the company’s mission timely and also spoke positively about its technical team and customer-focused approach.
Fireworks operates as a platform for artificial intelligence inference and model training. It enables developers to adapt and run open models for business needs. The startup was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees.
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Startup valuation and Wehner’s experience
During its Series D funding round in July, Fireworks was valued at $17.5 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, while the company’s investors include Nvidia and Sequoia Capital. According to Business Insider, the startup is in the early stages of talks on raising new funds at a possible valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion.
Wehner joined Meta, then called Facebook, in 2012. From 2014 to 2022, he served as the company’s chief financial officer. Meta Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan said Wehner helped the company make difficult decisions during a period of significant growth.
In October, Fireworks reported an incident involving the unauthorized use of internal credentials. According to the company, a third party gained access to environment variables used in evaluation tasks for a limited number of customer accounts. Fireworks said it found no evidence of unauthorized access to models, datasets, training data, personal information or customers’ inference traffic within its security perimeter or control systems.
