Fireworks AI hires longtime Meta finance chief Dave Wehner as its chief financial officer

Fireworks AI, a company that runs artificial intelligence models for other businesses, has hired David Wehner, Meta's former chief financial officer, as its own CFO, Wehner and Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao announced in social media posts Friday, Nov. 6.

A chief financial officer runs a company's money:  budgets, fundraising, accounting and, for companies that plan to sell stock to the public, the reports that investors rely on.

What Fireworks does

Companies that want to use AI in their products need powerful computers to run the AI models, the programs that write text, answer questions or write code.  Fireworks rents out that service, a step called inference, which means using a trained model to produce answers.  Its website lists many "open" models, ones whose makers publish them for anyone to use, and charges by the amount of text processed.  It also helps customers retrain those models on their own data.

Fireworks says it now earns more than $1 billion a year at its current pace and handles more than 40 trillion tokens a day.  A token is a small chunk of text, roughly part of a word.  In July, it raised $1.5 billion from investors, including Nvidia, at a $17.5 billion valuation, the company said.  Its founding team came from PyTorch, Meta and Google, according to its website.  PyTorch is free software, first built at Meta, that many AI researchers use to build models.  The company lists job openings at an office in San Mateo.

Who Wehner is

Wehner became Facebook's CFO in June 2014, after two years leading its corporate finance and business planning, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.  Before that, he was CFO of online game maker Zynga, the filing says.  In November 2022, he moved to a new job as Meta's chief strategy officer, and Susan Li took over as CFO, a later filing shows.

Qiao wrote that Wehner told her he "wanted to get back to a smaller company" and that he will help scale Fireworks' "financial and operational foundations" as it expands its computer systems around the world.  In his own post on X, Wehner said he had announced earlier in the week that he is leaving Meta, and that "Fireworks has the right mission for the moment."  He wrote that companies will use AI to build on their own data and expertise, and that open models are priced low enough for wide use.  Meta had not filed a notice about his departure with the SEC as of Sunday afternoon.

Source:  Dave Wehner post on X, Nov. 6, 2026; Lin Qiao LinkedIn post; Fireworks Series D announcement, July 15, 2026; Fireworks About page; Fireworks model library; Facebook SEC filing, April 2014; Meta SEC filing, July 2022.