Fireworks AI funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Fireworks AI runs open-source AI models for other companies. Developers send it a request, and Fireworks returns an answer from a model such as DeepSeek, Kimi, or OpenAI's open-weight GPT-OSS, running on graphics chips it rents from more than 20 suppliers. Customers also use it to fine-tune those models on their own data, so the model learns their code base or their legal documents.

The company has raised about $1.8 billion across four funding rounds since 2022. Its latest round, a $1.505 billion Series D in July 2026, valued it at $17.5 billion.

Fireworks passed $1 billion in annualized revenue in July 2026, five times what it made a year earlier, and most of the new capital pays for more chips and more people to sell them. Let's dive into Fireworks AI's funding history.

Fireworks raised its first $77 million in two small rounds. It then took in more than $1.7 billion in nine months, as demand from AI coding tools took off.

Lin Qiao and six co-founders left Meta in 2022, where they had built and scaled PyTorch, the open-source software that most AI models are trained with. Benchmark led a $25 million Series A that year, with Sequoia joining. The round stayed quiet until TechCrunch reported it in March 2024.

The Series B in July 2024 added strategic money. Sequoia led, and Nvidia, AMD, and MongoDB Ventures joined, alongside angels such as former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, Airtable CEO Howie Liu, and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. At the time, Fireworks processed about 140 billion tokens a day, the small chunks of text that AI models read and write.

By the October 2025 Series C, coding tools and other AI apps had pushed Fireworks to serve more than 10,000 companies, ten times the count at the Series B, and processed more than 10 trillion tokens a day. The round mixed new shares with secondary sales, which let early holders cash out part of their stakes. The Wall Street Journal reported that about $20 million of the $250 million was secondary.

In May 2026, Bloomberg reported that Fireworks was in talks to raise at a $15 billion valuation, with Index Ventures set to co-lead. The round closed in July at a higher price and ended up six times larger than the Series C.

Hedge funds such as Atreides and Lone Pine, growth firms such as TCV and Insight Partners, and a Canadian pension fund, Ontario Teachers', joined the existing backers in the Series D. Nvidia invested again. Recent AI startup funding statistics show that about half of global venture funding in 2025 went to AI companies.

On September 25, 2026, Lin Qiao announced a $132 million tender offer for employees, led by Atreides. A tender offer lets staff sell some of their shares to an investor, so the money went to employees rather than the company, and Fireworks did not disclose the share price.

Fireworks' valuation rose about 32-fold in two years. Each jump tracked a jump in revenue.

The price rose about sevenfold from the Series B to the Series C, when annualized revenue had passed $280 million. That put the Series C at roughly 14 times the company's revenue run rate.

The Series D valuation rose about 4.4 times, slightly faster than revenue over the same nine months. That left the multiple at about 17 times the run rate.

Fireworks' rounds stay small next to the model labs, which pay to train models from scratch. OpenAI's much larger funding rounds run to tens of billions of dollars at a time, while Fireworks pays only to serve and tune models that others have trained.

Fireworks' investors include the venture firms that backed the PyTorch team early, the chipmakers whose hardware it runs on, and the growth and hedge funds that bought in once revenue passed $1 billion.

Benchmark led the first round in 2022 and Sequoia joined it. Sequoia then led the Series B, and partner Sonya Huang said the team's experience building "high-performance inference stacks" was the reason.

Sequoia came back for the Series C. Benchmark is still listed among Fireworks' backers in the Series D press release.

Nvidia and AMD both invested in the Series B. Both make the graphics chips Fireworks' software runs on, and Fireworks has worked with each on infrastructure tuning since at least 2024.

Nvidia returned for the Series D, and Fireworks plans to deepen its partnership with the chipmaker. Much of what Fireworks spends on computing power ends up, through its cloud suppliers, as revenue for Nvidia's data center chip business.

AMD was not named in the Series C or D, though Fireworks still lists it as a backer. For a chipmaker with AMD's widely held ownership, the stake is a small bet on an inference buyer it has worked with since 2024.

Index Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Evantic co-led the Series C. Index then co-led the Series D, and Lightspeed and Evantic both invested again. All three have now backed Fireworks at both the $4 billion and the $17.5 billion price.

Atreides Management, the fund run by Gavin Baker, co-led the Series D with Index and TCV. Baker said he expects companies to use frontier and open models together, and he backed Fireworks as the platform for the open side.

Two months later, Atreides also led the $132 million employee tender offer. It was the second time in three months that Atreides bought Fireworks shares.

The rest of the round includes Bessemer, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Menlo Ventures, 20VC, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and several smaller funds. Bessemer noted that Fireworks grew from $100 million to more than $1 billion in annualized revenue in 16 months.

MongoDB Ventures and Databricks Ventures are the two software investors. MongoDB partnered with Fireworks on retrieval tools in 2024, and Databricks invested before the Series B. Databricks was also started by seven co-founders, and Databricks' founder-controlled ownership shows how such a team can keep control through many late-stage rounds.

Angels include Frank Slootman, Sheryl Sandberg, Howie Liu, and Alexandr Wang, plus executives from LinkedIn, Confluent, Meta, and 1Password. Slootman, Sandberg, Liu, and Wang joined at the Series B.

Fireworks charges for use. Developers pay per token for shared "serverless" models, or pay by the hour for dedicated graphics chips. Most of the funding goes into the chips that serve those tokens, the people who sell and build the platform, and acquisitions.

Fireworks runs what Bessemer calls a virtual GPU cloud across more than a dozen cloud providers and more than 20 regions, so it does not depend on a single cloud. Microsoft is one of its suppliers.

After the Series C, Fireworks said it would grow its computing footprint three to four times within a year. The Series D announcement again named global compute capacity as a main use of the money.

Research firm Sacra estimates Fireworks' gross margin at about 50%, with a target of 60%, below a typical software company's because Fireworks rents its chips. That gap is why cheaper serving per token matters so much to the business.

Fireworks had about 200 employees in July 2026, and Qiao told CNBC she expects about 600 by the end of the year. For years customers signed up on their own, and the company now wants a sales team.

In April 2026, Fireworks hired George Hu as president. Hu is a former Salesforce chief operating officer who later helped grow Twilio.

Fireworks bought Hathora in March 2026 for an undisclosed price. Hathora built software to route gaming servers across 14 regions, and Fireworks uses that experience to send AI requests to the fastest available chips.

Research money goes into the inference engine and training tools. Fireworks made its Training API generally available on August 31, 2026, letting customers fine-tune and run reinforcement learning on open models inside the platform.

Named customers include Uber, Shopify, Samsung, DoorDash, Notion, Revolut, and GitLab, and large companies like these are Fireworks' main growth target. A March 2026 deal puts Fireworks models inside Microsoft Foundry on Azure, and the company says 95% of the tokens it serves come from models customers have customized.

Fireworks is adding model training to model serving, starting with the Training API, and it will hold its first developer conference, Forge, in San Francisco on November 3, 2026. The company has not filed for an IPO, and its executives have not said when it might list. The September tender offer gave employees a way to sell shares without one.

About half of Fireworks' revenue in 2025 came from Cursor, its largest customer, which makes Cursor the biggest risk. SpaceX bought Cursor in August 2026, and Cursor's new ownership comes with what Cursor calls the largest GPU fleet in the world. Fireworks also competes with Together AI, the big cloud providers, and chipmakers selling their own inference services, such as Groq, whose venture-backed ownership structure resembles Fireworks' own. Baseten, another inference startup that serves Cursor, closed its own $1.5 billion round in June 2026.

Fireworks AI has raised about $1.83 billion across four rounds. The largest was a $1.505 billion Series D in July 2026. The earlier rounds were a $25 million Series A in 2022, a $52 million Series B in 2024, and a $250 million Series C in 2025.

Fireworks AI's lead investors are Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Index Ventures, Evantic, Atreides Management, and TCV. Nvidia, AMD, MongoDB, and Databricks are strategic investors, and Bessemer, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Ontario Teachers' joined the Series D.

Fireworks AI was valued at $17.5 billion after its Series D in July 2026. That is up from $4 billion in October 2025 and $552 million in July 2024.

No. Fireworks AI is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares change hands only in funding rounds and private sales, such as the $132 million employee tender offer in September 2026.

Fireworks AI is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. CEO Lin Qiao and six co-founders from Meta's PyTorch team started the company, and its largest outside holders are venture and growth funds such as Sequoia, Benchmark, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, Evantic, Atreides, and TCV. The company has not disclosed individual stakes.