Fireworks AI in talks for new funding round at valuation of up to $40 billion

BlockBeats news, October 22 — AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI is in early talks for a new funding round, targeting a valuation of about $30 billion to $40 billion, a significant increase from its $17.5 billion valuation in its July Series D round. People familiar with the matter said the negotiations are still at an early stage and the valuation target may change, while Fireworks declined to comment.

Fireworks AI was founded in 2022 by people with backgrounds at Meta and Google's AI teams. CEO Lin Qiao previously led Meta's PyTorch team. The company mainly leases computing power and software for enterprises to run, fine-tune and deploy open-weight and custom models. When it announced the completion of a $1.5 billion Series D in July, it said annualized revenue had exceeded $1 billion and that it processed more than 40 trillion tokens per day, about 95% of which came from models customized to customer needs. Amid the funding talks, the company disclosed this month a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal credentials and access to data in some customer accounts.