Fireworks Tops $1 Billion In Annualized Revenue, Raises $1.5 Billion At $17.5 Billion Valuation

According to CNBC, Nvidia-backed cloud startup Fireworks said Thursday that it has surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue, up fivefold from a year earlier, and raised a $1.5 billion round at a $17.5 billion valuation. Co-founder and CEO Lin Qiao said demand has been growing rapidly and that the company is seeing strong interest in its platform for running AI models. Fireworks competes with Amazon and Google in cloud services for developers and has been expanding beyond inference into AI model training. The company said it now handles 40 trillion AI tokens per day, and Qiao said its customer base is more diversified than before, with clients including Elastic, GitLab and MongoDB. Fireworks also announced a partnership with Microsoft in March that lets Microsoft customers access models through Fireworks, while the startup relies on computing power from more than 20 suppliers. The latest round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia also participating, alongside Evantic and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Fireworks, founded in 2022 by Qiao and six co-founders, employs about 200 people and expects that number to rise to 600 by the end of 2026.