Fireworks AI raises $1.5B Series D at $17.5B; surpasses $1B ARR with 40T+ tokens/day, 95% custom models

Fireworks, the platform for specialized intelligence enabling companies like Uber and Shopify to train and serve custom models, announced a $1.505 billion Series D round at a $17.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from existing investors Evantic, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and NVIDIA. The valuation represents a ~4.4x jump from its $4 billion Series C just nine months ago.

The funding comes as Fireworks surpasses $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, up 5x year-over-year from its last funding round. Over the same period, the company nearly tripled the daily volume of tokens served on its platform, from 15 trillion to more than 40 trillion. Today, 95% of tokens served through Fireworks are from models that have been specialized.

Fireworks offers more than 200 models across text, image, and multimodal formats, with support for major new open releases within hours of launch. Fireworks will use the new funding to continue expanding its engineering team and global compute capacity to meet skyrocketing enterprise demand, and deepen partnerships with cloud partners like Microsoft and NVIDIA. Customers include Doximity, Revolut, Shopify, Harvey, Cursor, Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB.

For infrastructure teams evaluating AI inference platforms: Fireworks' $1B ARR, 40T token volume, and 95% custom-model mix signal a strategic pivot in enterprise AI. Rather than renting frontier models, enterprises are increasingly fine-tuning open models on proprietary data. Fireworks' 5x YoY growth and $1.5B raise suggest the market believes specialized intelligence is capturing meaningful value. The cost advantage (5–10x cheaper than closed alternatives) is a key procurement lever.