Dave Wehner ran Meta’s finances for eight years. His next finance job is at Fireworks, a four-year-old startup that trains and runs open AI models for businesses, where he will be chief financial officer.
Wehner, Meta’s chief strategy officer since late 2022, made the move public in a post on X Friday night, writing that he had announced his exit from Meta earlier in the week. The Information had the hire as an exclusive. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao told CNBC that Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company’s finances and operations, and wrote on LinkedIn, in a post CNBC quoted, that “Dave told me he wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again.”
Wehner’s own post leaned on the economics of open models. “Open models offer price points that allow the technology to have the greatest impact,” he wrote, adding that he was “thrilled to be joining a founder-led growth company where I can roll up my sleeves and put my experience to work.”
Fourteen years at Meta
He joined Facebook in 2012 and became CFO in 2014, CNBC said. A Meta filing from July 2022 shows he told the company that month he would move into a new chief strategy officer role effective Nov. 1, 2022, with Susan Li, then vice president of finance, taking over as CFO.
Meta COO Javier Olivan said in a statement to CNBC that Wehner “helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and brought disciplined thinking to some of our hardest company-level decisions.” CNBC’s report did not name a successor in the strategy job.
The company he’s joining
Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in July at a $17.5 billion valuation, in a Series D led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia among the participants. The company said then that it had passed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate and was serving more than 40 trillion tokens a day, more than 95% of them from models specialized on customers’ own data. Its announcement pointed to Cursor’s coding models and Harvey’s legal AI as examples of what gets built on the platform.
Cursor used to be a much bigger slice of the business. About half of Fireworks’ revenue came from the coding startup as of last year, CNBC reported in July, when Qiao told the network, “We are much more diversified right now.” SpaceX had agreed in June to buy Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal. Fireworks also hired former Salesforce executive George Hu as president in April.
The inference market Wehner is walking into is crowded, with Baseten and Together AI among the startups CNBC listed as Fireworks’ peers. Generative media inference company Fal raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation earlier this month. Business Insider reported in October that Fireworks was in early talks to raise again at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion.
Qiao, a former Meta director, started Fireworks in 2022 with six co-founders. In a July interview at the company’s San Mateo, Calif., headquarters, she put head count at around 200 and said she expected it to reach 600 by the end of the year.
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