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Fireworks Raises $1.5 Billion at $17.5 Billion Valuation

The Nvidia-backed inference cloud will use the funds to buy GPUs, hire sales teams and scale a lower-cost model service that appeals to enterprises seeking cheaper alternatives to the biggest proprietary AI models.

Overview

  • Fireworks said on Thursday it closed a $1.5 billion financing round that values the company at about $17.5 billion and was led by Atreides, Index Ventures and TCV with participation from Nvidia.
  • The company reported it has topped $1 billion in annualized revenue and that its platform now processes roughly 40 trillion AI tokens per day, figures the company provided and that vary in public reporting.
  • Fireworks’ business centers on hosting open-weight and third-party models and selling smaller, customized models on a pay-per-token basis to cut inference costs for specialized enterprise workloads.
  • The startup plans to use the new capital to buy more GPUs, expand engineering and sales headcount and deepen partnerships with cloud suppliers including a March arrangement that routes Microsoft customers to its models.
  • The move underscores growing enterprise demand for cheaper, customizable model hosting and raises competitive pressure on large cloud and model vendors while boosting the market for GPU-focused infrastructure providers.