Dave Wehner has spent 14 years at Meta, more than eight of them as chief financial officer. On Friday, he announced that he is leaving his role as chief strategy officer to become CFO of Fireworks, an AI inference start-up.

The Information first reported the move on Friday evening. Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning. He became CFO in 2014 and moved to the strategy role in 2022.

“Fireworks has the right mission for the moment,” Wehner wrote on X.

In the post, he thanked Mark Zuckerberg and said he was “incredibly optimistic” about Meta's future. He said he had known Fireworks chief executive Lin Qiao for a long time and wanted to join a founder-led growth company.

“I see AI as the most consequential technology shift of my lifetime. I'm excited to get to work and help build a business at the center of it,” he wrote.

Lin told CNBC that Wehner will scale the company's finances and operations. She also wrote about the hire on LinkedIn on Friday.

“Dave told me he wanted to get back to a smaller company where he could build toward a big impact again,” Lin wrote.

Meta chief operating officer Javier Olivan also gave CNBC a statement.

“Dave helped guide Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and brought disciplined thinking to some of our hardest company-level decisions,” Olivan said.

Fireworks and its next round

Former Meta and Google employees founded Fireworks in 2022. Its platform lets developers customise and run open AI models for their businesses. It raised $1.5bn in July at a $17.5bn valuation, in a round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV. Nvidia and Sequoia Capital are also backers.

Two outlets have reported on its next round. Business Insider reported in October that it was in early talks to raise at a valuation of $30bn to $40bn. The Information now reports that Fireworks will start a new round next week, citing people familiar with the matter. It is targeting a valuation of at least $30bn, The Information reported. TNW has not independently verified either report.

Other inference start-ups have also raised big rounds in recent weeks, including Fal at $16bn and Baseten's planned round.

From Zynga to Meta

Before Facebook, Wehner was CFO of Zynga and a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Co., The Information reported. He also sits on the board of Aurora Innovation, which makes self-driving technology for trucks.