Meta's longtime finance chief leaves for a four-year-old AI startup reportedly seeking to double its value

Dave Wehner ran Meta's finances for eight years and has been its chief strategy officer since 2022. He is leaving to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, an AI startup founded in 2022. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday, and CNBC reported it.

For investors, the hire is a signal. Seasoned public-company finance chiefs rarely join private startups just to keep the books. They usually come to build the controls, reporting and investor relationships a company needs before a much larger raise or a stock market listing.

Fireworks has announced no plans to go public. But Business Insider reported in October that it is in early talks to raise money at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion. That would be roughly double the $17.5 billion it set in July.

Chief executive Lin Qiao told CNBC that Wehner will scale the company's financial and operational processes. Neither side has given a start date. Meta has not named a replacement for the strategy job.

What Fireworks sells, and why investors are paying up

Fireworks is an inference company. Inference is the work of running an AI model after it has been built, every time a customer sends it a question or task. Fireworks rents out that capacity on its own computing clusters.

Its pitch is that businesses can take freely available AI models, tailor them to their own tasks, and run them more cheaply than paying a large lab such as OpenAI. The company says 95% of the work it handles now comes from these customized models. That claim, like its other figures, is self-reported.

The growth numbers explain the valuation. In July, Fireworks raised $1.505 billion in a round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia among the backers. It said annualized revenue had passed $1 billion, five times the level at its previous round.

Daily volume rose from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion tokens over the same stretch. Tokens are the small chunks of text an AI model reads and writes. Customers named across reports include Uber, Shopify, Samsung, GitLab, DoorDash and Notion.

The price of owning a piece has risen fast. Fireworks was valued at $4 billion in October 2025. Dealroom calculates that a $40 billion valuation would equal about 40 times its revenue run rate, against roughly 17.5 times in July.

Rivals are being repriced too. Baseten was valued at $13 billion in June and was reportedly in talks near $26 billion by September. Modal Labs raised at $15.75 billion in October. Fal, which runs image and video models, has reportedly discussed raising money at about $15 billion. The whole business of renting out AI computing is attracting money that once went mostly to the model makers.

Why a Meta veteran fits, and what Meta loses

Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 after serving as chief financial officer of game maker Zynga. He became Facebook's finance chief in 2014 and held the role until late 2022, when Susan Li succeeded him and he moved to the newly created strategy post.

Fireworks has deep Meta roots. Former Meta and Google employees founded it. Qiao previously led PyTorch, the Meta-built software toolkit that much of the AI industry uses to build models. Meta's free Llama models also helped create the market for running open models that Fireworks now serves.

In his post on X, Wehner called Fireworks' mission timely and praised its technical team, according to outlets summarizing CNBC's report.

For Meta, the cost is less about one job and more about what the move says. A startup can now lure a top executive who spent 14 years inside one of the world's most profitable companies. Equity in a fast-rising private AI firm can outweigh a senior Big Tech pay package. Incumbents must now compete with that offer for experienced leaders, not just engineers.

The risks a new finance chief inherits

Wehner arrives weeks after a security lapse. On October 6, Fireworks found that internal credentials had been used without permission. An outside party gained access to stored settings in evaluation jobs for a limited number of customer accounts.

Fireworks believes some of those settings were captured, including API keys, the passwords software uses to connect to other services. Fireworks says it has found no evidence that customer models, data, prompts or outputs were accessed within its systems. It revoked and rotated keys, and its review is continuing. Any future listing would have to explain risks like this to investors.

Competition is the other open question. Fireworks lists Microsoft and Nvidia as close partners, and both also sell AI computing in their own right. Customers can move their workloads if a cheaper option appears. A valuation near 40 times revenue leaves little room for slowing growth.

Watch three things. Does the new round close in the reported $30 billion to $40 billion range? Does Fireworks add other public-company roles, such as a general counsel or audit chief? And does Meta fill the strategy job from inside, or let it lapse?