Meta's chief strategy officer, Dave Wehner, is leaving the company to become chief financial officer of Fireworks AI, a fast-growing startup that runs artificial intelligence models for businesses.

Wehner announced the move in a post on X on Friday, 6 November. "Fireworks has the right mission for the moment," he wrote, adding that he had become increasingly convinced of the opportunity ahead for the four-year-old company. Crypto Briefing and MLQ both reported the move on 7 November, following earlier reporting by CNBC and The Information.

More than a decade at Meta

Wehner is one of Meta's longest-serving senior executives. He joined Facebook in 2012 as vice-president of corporate finance and business planning, and became chief financial officer in 2014, a role he held for eight years. When Susan Li took over as CFO in November 2022, Wehner moved into the newly created post of chief strategy officer, overseeing strategy and corporate development.

His departure removes a figure with deep institutional knowledge from Meta's top team, though the company is not losing a sitting CFO — Wehner had already stepped away from the finance role four years ago. Meta has not publicly commented on the departure, and neither company has said when Wehner will start at Fireworks or who will take over his strategy duties at Meta.

What Fireworks does

Fireworks was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google engineers, and its chief executive, Lin Qiao, previously led Meta's PyTorch team, which built one of the most widely used frameworks for developing machine-learning models. The company operates in AI inference — the business of running trained models for paying customers, as opposed to training them in the first place.

Its platform lets developers customise and run open AI models using their own data, rather than relying solely on closed models from the biggest labs. Customers include Uber, Shopify and Doximity, and the company says it processes more than 40 trillion tokens a day, most of them from models its clients have customised.

The numbers behind the hire

Fireworks' financial trajectory explains why it wanted a heavyweight finance chief. In July 2026 it raised $1.505 billion in a Series D funding round that valued the company at $17.5 billion. By mid-2026 it had reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate, climbing from $100 million in about 16 months.

Business Insider has reported that the startup is in early talks to raise money again, at a possible valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion. At Fireworks, Wehner will be responsible for scaling the company's finances and operations, Qiao told CNBC in a statement.

The move is the latest sign of where senior talent in tech sees opportunity. Wehner had a senior post at one of the world's most valuable companies and chose to leave it for a startup that did not exist until 2022 — a bet that the business of serving AI models, not just building them, is where the next phase of the industry's growth will be.