Meta Chief Strategy Officer Dave Wehner Leaves to Join Fireworks as CFO

Dave Wehner, Meta (META)'s chief strategy officer, is leaving the company to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, a four-year-old AI inference startup, he announced on X on Friday.

Fireworks is an AI inference and model-training platform focused on open models that lets developers customize and run open models for their businesses. It was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google (GOOGL) employees and was valued at $17.5 billion in a July Series D round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV. Nvidia (NVDA) and Sequoia Capital are also backers. Business Insider reported that Fireworks is in early talks to raise funds again at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation.

Wehner joined Meta, then called Facebook, in 2012 and was the company's chief financial officer from 2014 to 2022. Susan Li took over as CFO in November 2022, and Wehner became Meta's first chief strategy officer, overseeing strategy and corporate development.

Meta COO Javier Olivan said in a statement to CNBC that Wehner helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years and brought disciplined thinking to some of the company's hardest decisions.

Fireworks is notably smaller than Meta, which had about a $1.56 trillion market capitalization as of Friday's close. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday that Wehner wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again, and that Wehner sees AI as the defining technology shift of his lifetime and wants to help shape what comes next.

The move is the latest sign of senior talent leaving large platforms for AI startups. Fireworks' competitors include OpenAI and Anthropic, which are both pursuing large valuations.

In October, Fireworks disclosed a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal credentials, in which an unauthorized third party accessed environment variables used in evaluation jobs in a limited number of customer accounts. The company said it had not detected evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information or inference traffic within its security perimeter or control.

Meta shares were up 0.84% in delayed trading.