Fireworks AI raises $52M led by Sequoia at $522M valuation

Source: SiliconANGLE

The round was led by Sequoia Capital which placed its valuation at $522 million. Notable investors joining the round included Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and MongoDB Inc. alongside previous investors such as Benchmark and Databricks Ventures. Former Snowflake Chief Executive Slootman, former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Airtable CEO Howie Liu and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang also joined in the fundraise. The new funding brought the total raised by the company to $77 million.

“Unlike proprietary mega models that are generic, non-private, and hard to customize, Fireworks AI provides smaller, production-grade models that can be deployed privately and securely,” said CEO Lin Qiao. “Using minimal human-curated data, our ultra-fast LoRA fine-tuning allows developers to quickly customize models for specific needs, transitioning from dataset preparation to querying a fine-tuned model in minutes. These fine-tuned models are seamlessly deployed, maintaining the same performance and cost benefits as our base models.”

The company said it intends to double down on researching and building compound AI systems, which use multiple components instead of a single large mega-sized model. Compound AI systems take on tasks using a myriad of interacting parts, including multiple smaller models, external tools modalities and elements that interact similarly to microservices. Collectively, the company says, they get a job done.

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