Meta Strategy Chief Dave Wehner Leaves to Become CFO of AI Startup Fireworks

Dave Wehner, Meta's chief strategy officer, is leaving the company to become chief financial officer of AI startup Fireworks, CNBC reported. Wehner announced the move on X on Friday, November 7.

The move

Wehner joined Meta, then Facebook, in 2012 and served as its CFO from 2014 to 2022. Meta COO Javier Olivan said Wehner "helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years." Wehner wrote that Fireworks "has the right mission for the moment."

Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company's finances and operations. In a LinkedIn post, she said he wanted to return to a smaller company where he could again build toward a big impact.

About Fireworks

Fireworks runs an AI inference and model-training platform focused on open models. It was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees.

• Valued at $17.5 billion in a Series D round in July, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV
• Backed by Nvidia and Sequoia Capital, among others
• Business Insider has reported it is in early talks to raise funds at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion

CNBC noted that Fireworks competes with larger model providers including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Context

In October, Fireworks disclosed what it called a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal credentials. The company said it had found no evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information or inference traffic within its security perimeter.

Meta's market capitalization was about $1.56 trillion at Friday's close, according to CNBC. The article did not name a successor for Wehner's strategy role.