- Fireworks AI is reportedly in early talks to raise at a valuation of $30B to $40B.
- That compares with the $17.5B valuation of its $1.505B Series D in July.
- An October security incident exposed API keys and tokens in some customer accounts.
Fireworks AI was valued at $4 billion in October 2025. Business Insider reported that the California-based startup is in early talks to raise at $30 billion to $40 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. At the top of that range, the price would be 10 times its Series C mark.
The talks are preliminary, the target could change, and Fireworks declined to comment. Reports on the talks do not state a round size. The Information reported in late September that Fireworks had considered raising at about $30 billion, so the range now extends above that.
What investors have already paid for
Fireworks was founded in 2022 by engineers from the team behind PyTorch, the open-source AI framework developed at Meta.
Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO, previously led PyTorch at Meta. Her co-founders are Benny Chen, a former Meta ads infrastructure lead; Chenyu Zhao, who led Google’s Vertex AI; Dmytro Dzhulgakov and Dmytro Ivchenko, who both worked on PyTorch at Meta;James Reed, who worked on the PyTorch compiler; and Pawel Garbacki, who led core machine learning for Meta’s news feed, according to the company’s team page.
The platform lets companies train and serve custom versions of open models on their own data. Fireworks lists Uber, Shopify, Doximity, Geico, and Revolut as customers, and says Cursor and Harvey build specialised models on it. Harvey’s legal AI is one example.
Tech Funding News first reported the $4 billion valuation talks in July 2025. The $250 million Series C followed in October 2025, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Evantic, and took total funding to $327 million. On July 16, 2026, Fireworks announced a $1.505 billion Series D at $17.5 billion, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV. Evantic, Lightspeed, and Nvidia took part as existing investors, and 17 investors contributed in total, including 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
Fireworks said it passed $1 billion in annualised revenue, up fivefold from its last round. Daily token volume nearly tripled, from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion, and about 95% of those tokens come from models customised on customers’ own data.
Rivals are repricing at the same speed
Fireworks is not repricing alone. Baseten raised $300 million at $5 billion in January, then a $1.5 billion Series F at $13 billion on June 22, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, and Spark Capital. Bloomberg reported on September 23 that Baseten was in talks at about $26 billion. Modal Labs raised $355 million at $4.65 billion in May. It then said on October 14 that it had raised a $750 million Series D at $15.75 billion, led by Accel, and passed $1 billion in annualised run rate.TFN reported the talks on September 24. Together AI raised $800 million at $8.3 billion on July 1, led by Aramco Ventures.
The multiples are where Fireworks stands out. By TFN’s calculation, $30 billion to $40 billion is 30 to 40 times the $1 billion run rate Fireworks disclosed in July. The Series D priced it at about 17.5 times. Modal’s $15.75 billion sits at no more than about 16 times its run rate, and Baseten’s $13 billion was roughly 22 times a reported $600 million run rate from the first quarter. Fireworks has not published a newer revenue figure, so its true multiple depends on how much it has grown since July. Baseten and Modal also priced earlier rounds in tranches, so headline valuations blend different entry prices.
The market backdrop is large. IDC raised its 2026 forecast for AI infrastructure spending to $497 billion on July 21 and expects $1.08 trillion in 2029. Servers made up 97.6% of first-quarter spending, so the figure tracks the compute these startups buy, not the software they sells.
