Fireworks AI, a company that helps businesses train and run AI models built on open-source foundations, announced on 16 July 2026 that it had raised a $1.505bn Series D at a $17.5bn valuation. Law firm Orrick, which advised on the deal, described the valuation as post-money.
Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV led the round. Existing investors Evantic Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NVIDIA took part, and the full list of participants also included 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Lone Pine Capital, Menlo Ventures, Operator Collective, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Original Capital, Prysm Capital, Quantum Capital and TIME Ventures.
The company said its annualised revenue run rate had passed $1bn, five times the level at the time of its previous funding round.
“Every company holds knowledge no one else has: its data, its workflows, its customers, its definition of quality.”Lin Qiao, Co-Founder and CEO, Fireworks AI
What Fireworks does
Fireworks was founded by the team behind PyTorch, the open-source machine learning framework, and is led by co-founder and chief executive Lin Qiao. Its platform lets companies tune open models on their own data and then serve them in production. It offers more than 200 models across text, image and multimodal formats, and says it supports new open model releases within hours of their launch.
The company said daily token volume on its platform had risen from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion, and that 95% of the tokens it serves now come from specialised models. Customers named in the announcement include Uber, Shopify, Doximity, Geico and Revolut.
According to Intelligent CIO, Qiao said organisations increasingly want models trained on their own data, workflows and customer knowledge, with faster responses, lower costs and more control over their intellectual property.
What the money is for
Fireworks said it would use the funding to expand its engineering team, add global compute capacity and deepen its work with cloud partners Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Gavin Baker, chief investment officer and managing partner at Atreides Management, said in the release that Fireworks had assembled one of the most elite and technical teams in AI, and that its technology consistently set the pace for the industry.
A bet on specialised models
Fireworks sits between the developers of open-source models and the businesses that want to adapt those models to their own work. Intelligent CIO, in its coverage, tied the raise to growing enterprise demand for specialised AI. Fireworks' own figures point the same way: token volume on its platform nearly tripled, and almost all of that traffic now runs on models adapted to a customer's data.
The funding so far
The new round marks a sharp rise in valuation. Fireworks raised a $250m Series C in late 2025 at a $4bn post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Evantic, with existing investor Sequoia Capital taking part, according to Orrick. That round brought its total funding at the time to $327m.
On those figures, the Series D more than quadrupled the company's valuation in under a year. Fireworks did not give an updated total for the money it has raised. Its boilerplate also lists AMD, Benchmark and Sequoia Capital among its backers.
The company did not disclose its headcount. Its announcement carried a San Mateo, California, dateline.
Company website: fireworks.ai