Meta's chief strategy officer Dave Wehner, who previously served as the company's CFO from 2014 to 2022, is leaving after 14 years to become CFO of Fireworks, an AI inference startup last valued at $17.5 billion.
Dave Wehner, Meta's chief strategy officer and former chief financial officer, is leaving the company to become CFO of Fireworks, a four-year-old AI inference and model-training startup, he announced on X on Friday.
Fireworks, founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, operates a platform that lets developers customize and run open models for their businesses. The company was valued at $17.5 billion during a Series D fundraising round in July, with that round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV. Nvidia and Sequoia Capital are also among its backers.
Business Insider reported that Fireworks is in early talks to raise additional funds at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation.
Wehner joined Meta — then called Facebook — in 2012 and served as the company's CFO from 2014 to 2022 before transitioning to the chief strategy officer role. His tenure of 14 years covered some of the company's most consequential periods of growth and regulatory scrutiny.
"Dave helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and brought disciplined thinking to some of our hardest company-level decisions," Meta COO Javier Olivan said in a statement to CNBC.
At Fireworks, Wehner will be tasked with scaling the company's finances and operations, CEO Lin Qiao said in a statement to CNBC. "Fireworks has the right mission for the moment," Wehner wrote on X. "I've become increasingly bullish on what they are building. There's a remarkable depth of technical talent here, coupled with a very practical focus on what customers need."
Lin offered her own account of the hire in a LinkedIn post on Friday. "Dave told me he wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again," she wrote. "He sees AI as the defining technology shift of his lifetime and wants to help shape what comes next."
The contrast in scale is significant. Meta carries a market capitalization of approximately $1.56 trillion as of Friday's close, while Fireworks competes in an increasingly crowded AI infrastructure market against larger rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Fireworks is not without its own operational challenges. In October, the company disclosed a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal credentials, in which an unauthorized third party accessed environment variables used in evaluation jobs in a limited number of customer accounts. The company said in a press release that its investigation had not detected evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information, or inference traffic within its security perimeter.
Wehner's move reflects a broader pattern of experienced finance executives gravitating toward AI infrastructure companies as the sector attracts sustained institutional capital — reinforcing the degree to which the competition for financial leadership talent has extended well beyond the largest technology platforms.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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