Dave Wehner, Meta's chief strategy officer and one of the longest-serving finance leaders in big technology, is leaving the company after 14 years to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, the artificial intelligence inference startup. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday, and CNBC reported the appointment on Saturday. The move is one of the most high-profile executive departures from Meta's leadership team this year.
Wehner joined Facebook in November 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning. He became chief financial officer in June 2014 and held the role for more than eight years, guiding the company through a period of extraordinary growth. Meta's annual revenue rose from about 12.47 billion dollars in 2014 to about 116.61 billion dollars in 2022. In November 2022, Susan Li succeeded him as chief financial officer, and Wehner became Meta's first chief strategy officer, overseeing strategy and corporate development.
Before joining Facebook, Wehner was chief financial officer of the game company Zynga and a managing director at the investment bank Allen and Company. At Fireworks, chief executive Lin Qiao told CNBC that Wehner will be responsible for scaling the startup's finances and operations. Neither company has announced a start date, and Meta has not said who will take over Wehner's strategy duties.
Fireworks was founded in 2022 in California by Lin Qiao and six co-founders, most of them engineers who had built large-scale machine learning systems at Meta and Google. Qiao previously led PyTorch, the widely used open-source framework for building artificial intelligence models, at Meta. Fireworks now operates a platform that helps companies train, customize, and serve open models on their own data, and it offers more than 200 models across text, image, and multimodal formats. Its customers include Uber, Shopify, Doximity, and Revolut.
The company's growth explains why it would recruit a finance chief of Wehner's experience. In July, Fireworks raised 1.505 billion dollars in a Series D round at a 17.5 billion dollar post-money valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Nvidia and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company said at the time that it had passed 1 billion dollars in annualized revenue run rate, up fivefold in a year, and reporting since then has put its daily processing volume at more than 40 trillion tokens.
The hiring also arrives while Fireworks is reported to be weighing another large raise. Business Insider reported in October that the company was in early talks to raise fresh capital at a valuation of between 30 billion dollars and 40 billion dollars, although the round had not been finalized and Fireworks declined to comment on the specific terms. Fireworks has not announced any plans to go public, but bringing in a chief financial officer who has already run the finances of a large public company is the kind of step that mature private companies often take before a major financing or a public listing.
For Meta, the departure removes a veteran who helped shape the company's finances long before its current artificial intelligence spending race. Meta carried a market capitalization of about 1.56 trillion dollars at Friday's close. For the wider industry, the move underlines where the value in artificial intelligence is shifting: beyond training the largest models, toward the inference infrastructure that runs those models for customers every day, and toward the experienced operators who can finance that buildout.