Fireworks AI raises $1.5B Series D at $17.5B valuation
AI inference cloud Fireworks AI raised a $1.505B Series D at a $17.5B valuation, up 4.4x from its $4B Series C seven months earlier.
Based on reporting by CNBC — analysis by dalili
AI inference cloud Fireworks AI raised a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, up roughly 4.4x from its $4 billion Series C just seven months earlier. The round, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV with Nvidia participating, coincides with the company crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue and serving more than 40 trillion tokens daily, up from 15 trillion a year ago. More than 95% of the tokens Fireworks now serves come from models specialized on customers proprietary data rather than general-purpose frontier models. Founded by Lin Qiao, who led the PyTorch team at Meta, Fireworks counts Uber, Shopify, Doximity, Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB among its customers. The company runs primarily on Nvidia GPUs and competes with Together AI and Baseten in the AI inference cloud market.
Key takeaways
- Fireworks AI raised $1.505B at a $17.5B valuation, up ~4.4x from $4B seven months earlier
- 95%+ of tokens served come from models specialized on customer data
- The company crossed $1B in annualized revenue, serving 40 trillion tokens daily
Why it matters
A 4.4x valuation jump in seven months, tracking real revenue, is strong evidence that specialized AI models are scaling faster than the frontier-model race itself.
