Fireworks AI is seeking to raise fresh funding at a valuation between $30 billion and $40 billion, a dramatic jump just months after the AI-infrastructure startup was valued at $17.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The potential valuation leap reflects investors’ appetite for the companies selling the computing power and tools fueling the AI boom, even as Fireworks AI works through the fallout from a recent security incident.
The talks around the financing are still early, and valuation targets could still change. Fireworks declined to comment.
Founded in 2022, Fireworks was built by veterans of Meta and Google’s AI efforts. Chief executive Lin Qiao previously led the PyTorch team at Meta, while cofounders include former Meta infrastructure engineers and a former leader of Google’s Vertex AI. The company rents out computing infrastructure and software that lets businesses run, fine-tune, and deploy open-weight and custom AI models.
In July, Fireworks announced a $1.5 billion Series D funding round at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Nvidia, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures. That round followed a $250 million Series C at a $4 billion valuation in late 2025, co-led by Lightspeed, Index, and Evantic. Last month, The Information reported that Fireworks has been considering a round at a $30 billion.
Rather than trying to build a consumer chatbot to rival ChatGPT, Fireworks sells what it calls specialized intelligence: models customized on a customer’s proprietary data, workflows, and use cases. The company said in July that it had surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue and was serving more than 40 trillion tokens a day; it said 95% of those tokens came from models tailored to customers.
The company operates in a highly competitive layer of the AI stack. Rivals include model-infrastructure startups such as Together AI, Baseten, and Replicate, as well as cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle.
The fundraising talks come shortly after a security incident at Fireworks AI. The company said it identified unauthorized use of internal credentials earlier this month that allowed an intruder to access data from some customer accounts.
“We take this seriously and will be transparent about what happened and what we find,” Qiao posted on X. “I’m personally committed to turn this attack into the most formidable security response in AI Infra.”
Please send along your tips. Email Ben or Katie anytime or contact them on Signal at benbergman.11 and kroof.26. Sign up for Business Insider’s weekly VC Insider newsletter here.
