Skip to main content

Fireworks AI

Category: AI Infrastructure

Enterprise-grade platform for hosting, fine-tuning, and serving large language models (LLMs) and image models with high performance and cost efficiency. Fireworks AI was founded in 2022. The company is led by Lin Qiao. Based in Redwood City, California, USA. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $77 million. Latest round: Series C, $250.0M, 2025-10, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Evantic. Key investors include ["Sequoia Capital","Benchmark","NVIDIA","AMD","MongoDB Ventures","Databricks Ventures","Frank Slootman","Sheryl Sandberg"].

Founded
2022
Headquarters
Redwood City, California, USA
Team size
11-50
Total funding
$77 million

Value proposition

Delivering the fastest inference speeds for open-source LLMs at lower costs, with flexible deployment options including dedicated private clusters for security and privacy.

Products and solutions

["Hosted APIs for open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama, Mixtral, etc.)","Serverless Fine-Tuning Services (LoRA)","FireFunction V2: an open weights function calling model","Dedicated Private Cloud Deployments","Enterprise-grade SLAs and security features"]

Unique value

A proprietary inference engine optimized for ultra-low latency, a strong focus on the open-source model ecosystem, and the option for dedicated GPU clusters per customer for enhanced privacy and security.

Target customer

Enterprises, developers, and startups building generative AI applications that require scalable, fast, and cost-effective LLM inference.

Industries served

["Technology/Software","E-commerce & Marketplaces","Customer Service","Legal Tech","Generative AI Applications"]

Technology advantage

Its proprietary inference engine delivers industry-leading speed for LLMs. A focus on open-source models prevents vendor lock-in for customers. Dedicated clusters offer a key advantage for enterprises with strict security and data privacy requirements.

How they differentiate

Differentiates through a focus on open-source models, superior inference speed at a lower cost, and flexible deployment options like dedicated clusters, contrasting with competitors' often proprietary, slower, or less flexible solutions.

Main competitors

["OpenAI API/Azure OpenAI Service","AWS Bedrock","Together AI","Google Vertex AI"]

Key partnerships

["Meta (PyTorch ecosystem)","Hugging Face","LangChain","NVIDIA","Amazon Web Services (AWS)","Google Cloud","Oracle"]

Notable customers

["Quora","DoorDash","Upwork","Cresta","Cursor","Liner","Superhuman","Sourcegraph","Tome"]

Major milestones

["Raised $52M Series B in July 2024, led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a $552M valuation.","Raised $25M Series A led by Benchmark in March 2024.","Introduced FireFunction V2, an advanced function calling model.","Demonstrated platform impact by tripling the response speed of Quora's Poe chatbot."]

Growth metrics

Grew to over 12,000 developers and began serving over 25 billion tokens daily as of March 2024.

Market positioning

Positioned as a leading enterprise provider for fast, scalable, and cost-effective open-source LLM hosting, fine-tuning, and inference.

Geographic focus

Primarily North America and Europe, but accessible globally via cloud APIs.

Patents and IP

No public patents listed; its proprietary inference engine (including custom kernels like FireAttention) is the core IP.

About Lin Qiao

Lin Qiao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fireworks AI. She has a strong background in software engineering and AI, with previous leadership roles at major tech companies. Before founding Fireworks AI, she was a Senior Director of Engineering at Meta, where she led the PyTorch team. Her experience also includes positions at LinkedIn, Teradata, and Cisco Systems. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara.

Official website: