Nvidia backed Fireworks hits 17.5 billion dollar valuation as companies chase cheaper AI models

6:30 AM · July 16, 2026

Fireworks, an AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia, raised 1.51 billion dollars in a Series D funding round that values the company at 17.5 billion dollars, according to CNBC. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from existing investors including Nvidia and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and will fund expansion of Fireworks's engineering team and global compute capacity. The company, founded in 2022 by former Meta director Lin Qiao and six co-founders, has grown quickly as businesses look for cheaper and faster ways to run AI models in production rather than relying solely on the largest labs' own hosted APIs. Fireworks now handles 40 trillion AI tokens per day and has surpassed 1 billion dollars in annualized revenue, roughly five times what it generated a year ago, with customers including Uber, Shopify, and Doximity. The company currently employs around 200 people and expects to grow to 600 by the end of the year. The scale of the round reflects how much investor interest has shifted toward the infrastructure layer that makes AI models cheaper and faster to run in practice, alongside continued enthusiasm for the model developers themselves.