Meta Strategy Chief Dave Wehner Leaves to Become Fireworks CFO
Dave Wehner, Meta's former CFO and current strategy chief, is joining Fireworks, an AI inference startup valued at $17.5 billion, as its finance chief.
Dave Wehner, the chief strategy officer of Meta Platforms and the company’s longtime former finance chief, is leaving the social media giant after 14 years to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, a fast-growing artificial intelligence infrastructure startup valued at $17.5 billion. Wehner confirmed the move in a post on X on Friday, and CNBC reported the details on Saturday after The Information first broke the news.
What happened
Fireworks, which runs a platform for building, customizing and running open AI models, said Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company’s finances and operations. Lin Qiao, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive, told CNBC that this would be the core of the new job.
In a LinkedIn post cited by CNBC, Qiao wrote that Wehner had said he wanted to return to a smaller company where he could once again build toward a large impact, and that he sees AI as the defining technology shift of his lifetime. Wehner wrote on X that “Fireworks has the right mission for the moment,” adding that he had grown increasingly bullish on what the company is building and pointing to its technical talent and practical focus on customers.
Meta did not issue a formal public statement on the departure, but Javier Olivan, Meta’s chief operating officer, praised Wehner in remarks provided to CNBC. Olivan said Wehner had helped steer the company through “tremendous growth and complexity” and brought “disciplined thinking” to difficult company-wide decisions.
Neither company has announced a start date, and Meta has not said who will take over Wehner’s responsibilities, according to CNBC and the AI news site MLQ.
Who is Dave Wehner
Wehner is one of the most recognizable finance executives in Silicon Valley. He joined Facebook in 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning, arriving from the game maker Zynga, where he had been chief financial officer for about two years, according to Startup Fortune and MLQ.
He became Facebook’s CFO in 2014 and held the post for roughly eight years, a period in which the company expanded its advertising business, rebranded as Meta and began its costly push into virtual reality and the so-called metaverse. In November 2022, Susan Li, then a finance vice president, succeeded him as CFO, and Wehner moved into a newly created chief strategy officer role overseeing strategy and corporate development.
The move takes him from one of the world’s largest companies to a far smaller one. Meta had a market value of about $1.56 trillion at Friday’s close, CNBC noted.
What Fireworks does
Fireworks was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees. Qiao previously led work on PyTorch, the open-source machine learning framework developed at Meta, according to Startup Fortune. The company specializes in inference, the process of running trained AI models to answer queries, and lets developers adapt open models to their own data without owning the underlying chips.
Its growth has been rapid. Key figures the company and its investors have disclosed include:
- A $1.505 billion Series D round in July 2026 at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia and Lightspeed Venture Partners among existing backers taking part, according to the company’s announcement as reported by Intelligent CIO.
- A $250 million Series C in October 2025 that valued the company at $4 billion, MLQ reported, meaning its valuation more than quadrupled in about nine months.
- Annualized revenue above $1 billion, which the company described as fivefold growth since its previous round.
- Daily processing volume that climbed from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion tokens, the units of text AI models read and generate.
Business Insider has reported that Fireworks is in early talks to raise money again at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion, according to CNBC. The startup competes in a crowded market that, CNBC noted, includes AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company has also faced scrutiny. In October, Fireworks disclosed “unauthorized use of internal Fireworks credentials,” saying an outside party had accessed environment variables in evaluation jobs belonging to a limited number of customer accounts. The company said it had found no evidence that customer models, datasets, training data, personal information or inference traffic had been accessed, CNBC reported.
Why it matters
Hiring a CFO who spent years running the finances of a major public company is a step that late-stage startups often take as they mature, and MLQ noted that such hires frequently precede a stock market listing. Fireworks has not announced any plans for an initial public offering, and neither company has suggested the hire is tied to one.
The departure also comes as investor money pours into the inference layer of the AI industry, where demand for computing capacity to run models has surged alongside the spread of AI assistants and coding tools. MLQ pointed to rival inference provider Fal, which raised funds at a $16 billion valuation, as another sign of that demand.
For Meta, Wehner’s exit removes one of the few remaining senior executives who helped guide the company through its transition from a fast-growing social network to a trillion-dollar technology conglomerate. Meta has not said whether it will fill the chief strategy officer post.
