Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner leaves to join AI infrastructure startup Fireworks as CFO

Dave Wehner is leaving Meta to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, a four-year-old AI infrastructure startup. The move takes a former senior executive from a company worth about $1.56 trillion to a much smaller business seeking to expand its AI services.

Fireworks builds tools for developers to customise and run open AI models, and was valued at $17.5 billion in a July funding round. It is reportedly in early talks to raise money at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation. Wehner joined Meta in 2012 and served as its CFO from 2014 to 2022; at Fireworks, he will focus on scaling finances and operations. In October, Fireworks disclosed unauthorised access to environment variables used in evaluation jobs for a limited number of customer accounts, while saying it had found no evidence that customer models, datasets or personal information were accessed.