Dave Wehner, Meta's chief strategy officer, is leaving to be CFO at Fireworks, an AI startup valued at $17.5 billion, which also had a security incident in October.
Dave Wehner, a longtime Meta executive and its former finance chief, is leaving the company to become chief financial officer (CFO) of Fireworks, a four-year-old AI startup. He announced the move on X on Friday. At Meta he was most recently chief strategy officer.
Wehner joined Meta, then called Facebook, in 2012. He was its CFO from 2014 to 2022. Meta COO Javier Olivan said he helped guide the company through 14 years of growth and complexity. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao said Wehner will scale the company's finances and operations. She wrote that he wanted a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again.
Fireworks was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees. It lets developers customize and run open AI models for their businesses. It was valued at $17.5 billion in a July funding round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV. Nvidia and Sequoia Capital also back it. Business Insider reported that it is in early talks to raise money at a $30 billion to $40 billion valuation.
In October, Fireworks disclosed a security incident. An unauthorized third party used internal company credentials and accessed environment variables, which are settings used in evaluation jobs, in a limited number of customer accounts. The company said it has found no evidence that customer models, datasets, training data, personal information or inference traffic were accessed. Its investigation was ongoing when it made that statement.
The material does not say when Wehner starts. Business owners who rely on AI vendors may want to ask how those vendors protect customer data.
If your business relies on AI vendors, ask how they protect your data and what they do if something goes wrong.
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