Dave Wehner leaves Meta to become Fireworks’ CFO and help scale its operations

Dave Wehner is leaving Meta’s chief strategy officer role to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, putting a longtime financial executive in charge of helping scale the AI startup. Wehner announced the move on November 6, 2026. Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao told CNBC that his responsibilities will cover the company’s finances and operations.

A return to financial leadership

The appointment brings Wehner back to a job he held through much of his Meta career. He joined the company, then called Facebook, in 2012 and served as its CFO from 2014 to 2022 before taking the strategy role he is now leaving.

Meta chief operating officer Javier Olivan credited Wehner with helping guide the company through 14 years of growth and complexity. In a statement to CNBC, Olivan said he brought disciplined thinking to some of Meta’s hardest company-level decisions.

Wehner framed the move around Fireworks’ technical staff and its attention to customers. Writing on X, he said he had become increasingly bullish on the business. Qiao’s explanation focused on the appeal of building at a smaller company rather than continuing at Meta.

Dave told me he wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again.

Lin Qiao, Fireworks CEO, in a November 6 LinkedIn post quoted by CNBC

A smaller company with substantial operating scale

Fireworks was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees. Its platform lets developers customize open AI models for their businesses and run them as services. It provides both model training and inference—the process of running a model to produce an answer.

The business Wehner is joining already reports considerable scale. In its July 15 funding announcement, Fireworks said its annualized revenue run rate had surpassed $1 billion. That measure expresses a revenue pace on a yearly basis; it is not the same as reporting $1 billion earned over a completed year.

Fireworks also said it was serving more than 40 trillion tokens daily—units of material processed by AI models. More than 95% came from models specialized using customers’ proprietary data. Those company-supplied July figures describe a platform heavily used for tailored business models, rather than just general-purpose ones.

The July Series D valued Fireworks at $17.5 billion and raised $1.505 billion, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV. Fireworks said that financing would support more computing infrastructure, a larger engineering team and further platform development. Those were the company’s stated expansion priorities before Wehner’s appointment to help scale finance and operations.