Fireworks, a San Mateo-based platform for building and serving specialized AI models, has raised a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from existing investors Evantic, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and NVIDIA. Additional investors in the round include 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Menlo Ventures, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and others.
The financing comes as Fireworks surpasses $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate — a 5x increase year-over-year from its last funding round — and as daily token volume on the platform has grown from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion over the same period. The company was founded by the team behind PyTorch.
Fireworks’ platform enables enterprises to take open-source AI models and customize them on proprietary data, workflows, and use cases, then serve those specialized models in production at scale. The core thesis is that general-purpose closed models from frontier labs — while powerful — cannot fully reflect the specific domain knowledge, customer context, and operational workflows unique to any given company, and that customized open models can match or outperform closed models on the tasks that matter most to a specific business while running faster and at significantly lower cost. As evidence of market adoption: 95% of tokens currently served through Fireworks come from models that have been customized rather than used off the shelf. Customers include Uber, Shopify, Doximity, and Revolut.
Fireworks offers more than 200 models across text, image, and multimodal formats, with support for major new open-source releases typically available within hours of launch. Proceeds will fund expansion of engineering headcount, global compute capacity, and partnerships with cloud providers including Microsoft and NVIDIA.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Lin Qiao, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Fireworks
“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. 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.”
Gavin Baker, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner, Atreides Management
