Dave Wehner, who spent more than eight of his 14 years at Meta as chief financial officer, is leaving to become CFO of Fireworks, an AI inference start-up.
He announced the move while serving as Meta's chief strategy officer, the job he held after his run as CFO. The Information first reported the news. Wehner joined Facebook in 2012, the year it went public, and stayed through its rebrand as Meta.
Inference is the step where a trained AI model answers a request, as opposed to training, when the model learns. Training gets the headlines. Inference is the part customers pay for each time they use a product, which makes it a business built on volume and unit costs. Fireworks sells into that second category.
A senior executive leaving a tech giant for a start-up is unusual enough to notice, and a CFO doing so is rarer still. The more telling detail is the pairing. Meta has been among the heaviest spenders on AI infrastructure, so Wehner has watched from the inside how expensive it is to run AI at scale. Fireworks now gets a finance chief with that experience.
What he does with it is the open question. Inference companies live on margins, and a CFO's work there is less about quarterly guidance than about what each request costs to serve and what it can be sold for.