Fireworks AI
AI Inference Infrastructure
- Valuation
- $17.5B(Series D, Jul 2026)
- Total Funding
- $52M
- Profit Status
- Pre-profit;API revenue
- Employees
- ~100
About Fireworks AI
Fireworks AI is a high-performance AI inference platform that serves open-source frontier models — including Llama 4, DeepSeek R1, Qwen, Mixtral, and FireFunction — at industry-leading speed and cost. Founded by ex-Google Brain researchers, Fireworks specialises in inference optimisation with custom CUDA kernels, speculative decoding, and multi-GPU orchestration, delivering latency benchmarks that consistently beat AWS, Azure, and Together AI. Its FireFunction V2 model leads tool-calling benchmarks.
Company History
Founded 2022 by Lin Qiao (ex-Google Brain TensorFlow tech lead) and team. Launched public beta 2023. FireFunction V2 (2024) topped function-calling benchmarks. Series A (2024) at $552M valuation. Partnerships with Anyscale, Snowflake Cortex, and Adobe Firefly. Became preferred inference provider for many enterprise AI teams.
Company Timeline
4 milestones- 2022Founded by ex-Google Brain researchers
- 2023Public beta launch; inference API for open models
- 2024FireFunction-v2 tops tool-calling benchmarks; Series A $52M at $552M valuation
- 2025Llama 4 and DeepSeek R1 on-platform; compound AI system for serverless agents
Products & Services
4- Fireworks Inference API
- FireFunction V2
- Compound AI System (serverless agents)
- On-premise deployment
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Lin Qiao (CEO / Co-founder)
- Denny Zhou (Co-founder)
- Dmytro Ivchenko (Co-founder)
Key Investors
- Benchmark
- Databricks
- Sequoia Capital
- Altimeter
Competitive Landscape
- Together AI
- Groq
- Replicate
- AWS Bedrock
- Vertex AI