SAN MATEO — Fireworks, an AI-platform for training custom models, has exploded with a $1.505 billion Series D round and valuing the company at $17.5 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from existing investors Evantic, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and NVIDIA.
Fireworks says it has surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, up 5x year-over-year from its last funding round. Over the same period, the company nearly tripled the daily volume of tokens served on its platform, from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion. The company’s growth reflects how AI strategies are maturing as companies increasingly complement frontier closed models with open models customized for their own data, workflows, and use cases.
“There are two paths forward for AI. In one, intelligence belongs to a few big labs, and everyone else rents it. In the other, every company in the world builds specialized intelligence of its own, shaped by the domain only it understands. We are building towards the second,” said Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks. “Every company holds knowledge no one else has: its data, its workflows, its customers, its definition of quality. Fireworks turns that knowledge into specialized intelligence they own and can keep improving, giving every company the infrastructure to build, serve, and scale the models that matter most to their business.”
As open models improve, more companies are looking beyond off-the-shelf frontier models and asking how AI can better reflect the knowledge, workflows, and customer context unique to their business. Today, 95% of tokens served through Fireworks are from models that have been specialized. Fireworks provides the training and inference tools to customize open models on customers’ proprietary data, creating specialized intelligence that can match or outperform general closed models on the tasks that matter most, while running faster and at significantly lower cost.
“Fireworks has assembled one of the most elite and technical teams in AI, paired with technology that consistently sets the pace for the industry and commercial momentum that very few companies have ever achieved at this scale,” said Gavin Baker, CIO and Managing Partner at Atreides Management. “We believe both frontier and open models will increasingly be used together. With a differentiated platform used and trusted by enterprises to train, customize, and serve open models in production, Fireworks is exceptionally well-positioned to unlock the value of specialized intelligence built on proprietary data and workflows.”
Fireworks offers more than 200 models across text, image, and multimodal formats, with support for major new open releases within hours of launch.
Fireworks will use the new funding to continue expanding its engineering team and global compute capacity to meet skyrocketing enterprise demand, and deepen partnerships with cloud partners like Microsoft and NVIDIA. Fireworks Series D funding comes from 20VC, Atreides Management, Bessemer Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, NVIDIA, Operator Collective, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Original Capital, Prysm Capital, Quantum Capital, TCV, and TIME Ventures.
