英伟达参投的私有 AI 云初创公司 Fireworks 融资并披露年化收入超 10 亿美元

Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue
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Nvidia-backed Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation as companies pursue cheaper AI models
Published Thu, Jul 16 2026
9:00 AM EDT
Jordan Novet
@in/jordannovet/
WATCH LIVE
Key Points
Fireworks, a startup whose cloud service runs open-source AI models for software developers, has raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation.
The company, which is backed by Nvidia, is now generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, five times more than it had last year.
Fireworks once received over half of its revenue from coding startup Cursor, but has diversified as more companies turn to open models, CEO Lin Qiao said.
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Fireworks founders pose for a photo at the startup's headquarters in San Mateo, California. From left in front row: Chenyu Zhao, CEO Lin Qiao and Benny Chen. Back row: James Reed, Pawel Garbacki, Dmytro Ivchenko and Dmytro (Dima) Dzhulgakov.
Fireworks
The cost of the latest
artificial intelligence
models is increasingly
breeding anxiety
among finance executives, who have started directing employees to consider open-source alternatives.
That's boosting cloud startup
, which competes with
Amazon
and
Google
to host models that developers can weave into applications. The
Nvidia
-backed company said Thursday that it has exceeded $1 billion in annualized revenue, five times what it had last year, and it has now raised a $1.5 billion round at a $17.5 billion valuation.
"We're seeing super-linear demand," Lin Qiao, Fireworks' co-founder and CEO, told CNBC in an interview at the company's headquarters in San Mateo, California. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have this kind of market."
Fireworks is much smaller than
Anthropic
OpenAI
, which investors have valued above $800 billion each this year, nor is it close to the top names in technology, whose market capitalizations are counted in the trillions. But the startup's revenue milestone suggests that companies aren't completely satisfied with the models coming out of the top labs.
The achievement also presents new evidence that Amazon,
Microsoft
and Google are not totally dominating in cloud computing.
Shares of easy-to-use cloud infrastructure vendor
DigitalOcean
are up 149% so far this year as growth
has accelerated
.
CoreWeave
, which rents out Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs,
raised $1.5 billion
in an initial public offering last year and is now worth $42 billion.
By managing computing infrastructure for models, Fireworks does business in the inference cloud market, alongside startups such as
Baseten
and Together AI. It's also started providing GPUs for training AI models, like neoclouds CoreWeave, Lambda and
Nebius
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Rather than go it alone, Fireworks has started forming alliances.
In March, it announced a
partnership
with Microsoft, which fields its own Foundry service for running open models. The arrangement allows customers of the Windows and Office company to draw on models through Fireworks, which relies on computing power from more than 20 suppliers, including Microsoft.
"Through Microsoft we can get much bigger reach," Qiao said.
Fireworks gives developers an easy way to adopt models from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek,
MiniMax
Z.ai
. Open-weight models OpenAI
released
last year are also available. The idea is for clients to bring their own data that frontier labs don't have and refine models until they deliver state-of-the-art performance for specific tasks, Qiao said.
While Anthropic and OpenAI serve up "generalized intelligence," Fireworks can unlock "specialized intelligence," she said.
The argument might sound familiar to those following the discourse of technology figureheads.
Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella
wrote in a Sunday
blog post
that "a company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique."
Nadella was referring to
Palantir
CEO
Alex Karp
's remarks on CNBC earlier this month.
Technical customers "want to know they own the means of production," Karp said. "It's not being transferred to someone else."
Dollars and cents are a factor, too. Cryptocurrency exchange operator
Coinbase
has been adopting cheaper models where it makes sense, CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a June
X post
"Our cost compared with the equivalent-quality closed model is five to 10 times cheaper," Qiao said.
A former
Meta
director, Qiao and six of her co-founders started Fireworks in 2022. The company employs around 200 people. Qiao expects the head count to reach 600 by the end of 2026.
"This is the year when we'll really hit the gas," Qiao said.
Fireworks hired former
Salesforce
executive George Hu as its president in April. The startup plans to assemble a formidable sales team after years of having customers sign themselves up. The new money will also help Fireworks obtain more GPUs and hire more technologists.
Developers are increasingly counting on Fireworks to handle requests.
Fireworks now handles 40 trillion AI tokens per day, Qiao said.
disclosed in May that its AI models were processing about
19 billion tokens
per minute for developers, implying more than 27 trillion per day. OpenAI
announced
in March that its developer tools were working through 15 billion tokens per minute, which would suggest about 22 trillion per day.
Each token
equates to about three-quarters of a single word.
As of last year, about half of Fireworks' revenue came from AI coding startup
Cursor
, which has become less dependent on OpenAI and Anthropic and built a custom model named
Composer
"We are much more diversified right now," Qiao said. In June,
Elon Musk
's
SpaceX
agreed to acquire Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal, with the transaction set to close this quarter. Other Fireworks clients include
Elastic
,
GitLab
MongoDB
Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV led Fireworks' new round. Nvidia also participated, as did Evantic and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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