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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: 51-200. Total funding raised: $327 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, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Evantic.

Founded
2022
Headquarters
Redwood City, California, USA
Team size
51-200
Total funding
$327 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, Microsoft Foundry (Azure)

Notable customers

Quora, DoorDash, Upwork, Cresta, Cursor, Liner, Superhuman, Sourcegraph, Tome, Samsung, Uber, Notion, Shopify

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., Raised $250M Series C in October 2025 at a $4B valuation, co-led by Lightspeed, Index Ventures, and Evantic., Launched on Microsoft Foundry (Azure) in March 2026, bringing open-model inference to Azure., Scaled to 15 trillion tokens processed daily and $315M+ annualized revenue by early 2026.

Growth metrics

Grew to over 10,000 companies and hundreds of thousands of developers, processing over 10 trillion tokens daily as of October 2025, scaling to 15 trillion tokens daily by early 2026. Annualized revenue surpassed $280M as of October 2025.

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.

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