Dave Wehner is leaving Meta to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, a company that helps developers customize and run AI models. Wehner announced the move on Nov. 6. Fireworks co-founder and chief executive Lin Qiao confirmed the hire and told CNBC that Wehner would help expand the company’s finance and operations.
Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 and became its finance chief in 2014. He moved into the chief strategy officer role in November 2022, a year after Facebook renamed itself Meta.
Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in July at a $17.5 billion valuation. Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV led the round, and Nvidia was among the existing investors that took part. Fireworks said its revenue was running at more than $1 billion a year, based on its sales pace at the time.
Fireworks charges developers to run trained models, a job called inference. On shared machines, customers can pay according to how much a model reads and generates, measured in units called tokens. Customers that need a steady level of service can reserve capacity. Fireworks names Uber and Shopify as customers.
On Nov. 3, Fireworks said it planned to add capacity in Europe using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell platforms, with deployments starting in 2027. It also announced a private preview of Fireworks Sovereign. Fireworks says the service runs models inside a customer’s cloud account or data center using computing capacity the customer already controls.
