Meta strategy chief Dave Wehner leaves to become CFO of Fireworks AI

Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner is leaving the company to become chief financial officer of Fireworks AI, an AI inference and model-training platform that helps companies customise and run open models, CNBC reported. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday.

Wehner joined Meta, then Facebook, in 2012 and was its CFO from 2014 to 2022. At Fireworks he will be tasked with scaling the company's finances and operations, CEO Lin Qiao told CNBC. "Fireworks has the right mission for the moment," Wehner wrote, adding that he had "become increasingly bullish on what they are building."

Fireworks, founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, was valued at $17.5 billion in a July Series D led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, and is also backed by Nvidia and Sequoia Capital. Business Insider reported it is in early talks to raise again at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation. In October, the company disclosed a security incident in which an unauthorised third party used internal credentials to access environment variables in a limited number of customer accounts.