A 14-year Meta veteran left the company for a startup founded four years ago by a former colleague. The move says more about the price of AI inference than about executive careers.
The departure
On 7 November, Dave Wehner confirmed he is leaving Meta, where he served as chief strategy officer, to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, an AI infrastructure company.
Wehner joined Facebook in November 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning. He became CFO in June 2014 and held the role for more than eight years before moving to the chief strategy officer position in November 2022.
He was inside the company through the shift to mobile advertising, the rename to Meta, the metaverse spending programme, and the redirection of capital into artificial intelligence.
The new employer is run by Lin Qiao, who worked at Facebook for seven years as a senior engineering director responsible for PyTorch and AI compilers, leading an engineering organisation of more than 300 people.
Four years, three valuations
Fireworks was founded in 2022 by Lin Qiao with six co-founders drawn largely from Meta and Google. The company sells inference capacity, letting enterprises call models through an API instead of building their own serving stack.
The funding record is unusually steep. Benchmark led a USD 25 million early round. In July 2024, Sequoia led a USD 52 million round at a USD 552 million valuation, with Nvidia and AMD participating.
In October 2025, Lightspeed, Index Ventures and Evantic co-led a USD 250 million C round at a USD 4 billion valuation. In July 2026, Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV co-led a USD 1.505 billion D round at USD 17.5 billion, with Nvidia returning.
That is roughly 32 times the valuation in two years. Foreign media report the company is preparing a new round targeting USD 30 billion to USD 40 billion.
Revenue caught up
Fireworks disclosed annualised revenue above USD 280 million in October 2025. By July 2026 the figure had passed USD 1 billion, with the platform handling more than 40 trillion tokens a day.
Customers include Uber, Shopify, Samsung and Notion, alongside the coding tool Cursor and the legal AI company Harvey.
The company has also bought capability. In March it acquired Hathora, a game-server technology firm whose strength is scheduling compute across regions to cut latency.
The Chinese founder
Lin Qiao grew up in China, the daughter of a mechanical engineer who designed large cargo ships. She studied computer science at Fudan University for both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, then completed a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006.
She worked at IBM and LinkedIn before joining Facebook in 2015. She left in 2022 to start Fireworks.
Her argument for the company was that hyperscalers can afford to build their own AI infrastructure, and most enterprises cannot. Having a good model is not the same as running it quickly, stably and cheaply inside a business.
Why an infrastructure CFO matters
Long-term compute contracts, customer commitments, cash-flow planning and eventual capital-markets transactions are the areas Wehner ran at Meta. A public-company CFO joining a USD 17.5 billion private company is read as preparation rather than coincidence.
Fireworks has not announced listing plans.
The strategic point sits below the executive news. Inference is the toll booth between model builders and the wider economy. The company that owns the toll booth sets the price at which AI gets deployed, and that price determines how quickly the technology spreads beyond firms that can build their own racks.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://36kr.com/p/4060533056508801.