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Fireworks AI

Private

AI Inference Infrastructure

Founded 2022Redwood City, CA~100 (2025) employees
Website

Valuation

$552M (Series A, 2024)

Total Funding

$52M

Profit Status

Pre-profit; API revenue

Employees

~100

About Fireworks AI

Fireworks AI is a high-performance AI inference platform that serves open-source frontier models — including Llama 4, DeepSeek R1, Qwen, Mixtral, and FireFunction — at industry-leading speed and cost. Founded by ex-Google Brain researchers, Fireworks specialises in inference optimisation with custom CUDA kernels, speculative decoding, and multi-GPU orchestration, delivering latency benchmarks that consistently beat AWS, Azure, and Together AI. Its FireFunction V2 model leads tool-calling benchmarks.

Company History

Founded 2022 by Lin Qiao (ex-Google Brain TensorFlow tech lead) and team. Launched public beta 2023. FireFunction V2 (2024) topped function-calling benchmarks. Series A (2024) at $552M valuation. Partnerships with Anyscale, Snowflake Cortex, and Adobe Firefly. Became preferred inference provider for many enterprise AI teams.

Company Timeline

  • 2022

    Founded by ex-Google Brain researchers

  • 2023

    Public beta launch; inference API for open models

  • 2024

    FireFunction-v2 tops tool-calling benchmarks; Series A $52M at $552M valuation

  • 2025

    Llama 4 and DeepSeek R1 on-platform; compound AI system for serverless agents

Products & Services

Fireworks Inference APIFireFunction V2Compound AI System (serverless agents)On-premise deployment

Company Details

Focus Area

AI Inference Infrastructure

Stage

Private

Founded

2022

Headquarters

Redwood City, CA

Employees

~100 (2025)

Financial Overview

Total Funding

$52M

Valuation

$552M (Series A, 2024)

Profit Status

Pre-profit; API revenue

Key Investors

BenchmarkDatabricksSequoia CapitalAltimeter

Key People

  • Lin Qiao (CEO / Co-founder)
  • Denny Zhou (Co-founder)
  • Dmytro Ivchenko (Co-founder)

Competitive Landscape

Together AIGroqReplicateAWS BedrockVertex AI

Tags

Inference
API
Open-Source
Speed
LLM Serving
Enterprise