Fireworks AI is a US cloud company that provides inference infrastructure for AI models, with a business built around serving open-weight models at lower cost than frontier-lab APIs. The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Lin Qiao — who previously led Meta's PyTorch team as senior director of engineering — together with co-founders from that team (Source: techfundingnews.com). On July 16, 2026, it raised a $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, on more than $1 billion of annualized revenue, with coverage attributing its growth to demand for cheaper open-model inference (Source: cnbc.com).
The round — $1.505 billion per the company's announcement — was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Evantic Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nvidia, 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures; the company said it would use the proceeds to expand its engineering team and global compute capacity and to deepen partnerships with Microsoft and Nvidia (Source: businesswire.com). At the announcement, Fireworks reported serving more than 40 trillion tokens per day, with more than 95% of that volume coming from models specialized on customers' proprietary data and optimized for specific tasks, and named Uber, Shopify, Doximity, Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB among its customers (Source: fireworks.ai).
Snapshot
Valuation
| Date | Valuation | Round | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-16 | $17.5B | $1.5B Series D | (Source: cnbc.com) |
Revenue
| Date | Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-16 | Annualized revenue | more than $1B | (Source: cnbc.com) |
Relationships
- related: Open-Weight Frontier Models — the model class whose adoption drives its inference demand
- related: Inference Economics and Token Pricing — the cost-competition dynamic behind the raise
- related: CoreWeave — fellow AI-specialized cloud provider (GPU cloud rather than inference-API layer)
Confidence note: Medium — funding, revenue, and customer facts corroborated across CNBC, the company's own announcement, and the syndicated press release; founding history rests on secondary profiles of the CEO.