Nvidia-backed startup Fireworks valued at $17.5 billion in latest funding

Nvidia-backed AI infrastructure startup Fireworks said it raised $1.51 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation to expand ​its engineering team and global compute capacity.

The Series ‌D funding round was led by investment firms Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV. Participants included existing investors like Nvidia and ​Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Fireworks, founded by former Meta engineers ​in 2022, said it has surpassed $1 billion in annualized ⁠revenue run rate — up fivefold, year-over-year.

Daily tokens, the ​basic units of text that AI models process, served on ​its platform increased to more than 40 trillion from 15 trillion in that period, it added.

Fireworks provides AI inference and model-serving infrastructure, ​helping companies build, customize and deploy AI models tailored ​to their business needs.

It is looking to support growing demand for ‌cheaper ⁠AI models.

The company, which competes with startups such as Together AI and Baseten, last raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation in October.

“We believe both frontier and open models ​will increasingly be ​used together,” ⁠said Gavin Baker, CIO and managing partner at Atreides Management.

Fireworks’ customers include ride-hailing company ​Uber, e-commerce firm Shopify and telehealth company ​Doximity.

Other investors ⁠in the round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Menlo Ventures, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Lone Pine Capital, ⁠Fireworks ​said.

The company added that it would ​deepen its partnerships with cloud partners like Microsoft and Nvidia. Reuters