Meta Chief Strategy Officer Dave Wehner will leave the company to join Fireworks, a four-year-old startup founded by AI.

Wehner announced on Friday that he will take on the role of Chief Financial Officer at Fireworks. Fireworks is an open-source model-focused AI inference and model training platform, which was valued at $17.5 billion in its Series D financing in July this year.

Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao stated in a declaration sent to CNBC that Wehner will be responsible for expanding the company's finances and operations.

Wehner wrote on X: “Fireworks has a mission that is suitable for the current times.” He added, “I am becoming more and more optimistic about what they are building. There is a remarkable depth of technical talent here, and at the same time, they pay very practical attention to what the customers need.”

This AI startup was founded in 2022 by former employees of Meta and Google. It is a platform that allows developers to customize and run open-source models for their businesses. Its latest round of financing was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, and it also received support from Nvidia and Sequoia Capital. According to Business Insider, the company is in the early stages of negotiations for a new round of financing, which may result in a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion.

Wehner joined Meta, which was then called Facebook, in 2012 and served as the company's Chief Financial Officer from 2014 to 2022.

Meta Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan said in a statement sent to CNBC: “Dave has helped Meta through tremendous growth and complexity over 14 years, and has brought rigorous thinking to some of our most difficult corporate-level decisions.”

The scale of Fireworks is significantly smaller than that of Meta – as of Friday’s close, the market value of this tech giant was approximately $1.56 trillion – its competitors include OpenAI and Anthropic.

In the post LinkedIn published on Friday, Lin wrote: “Dave told me that he wants to return to a smaller company where he can build towards even greater influence once again. He considers AI to be the most decisive technological transformation of his life and hopes to help shape what will happen next.”

The company's size did not protect it from the risks and complexities typically associated with AI technology. In October, the company stated that it had discovered a "security incident involving unauthorized use of Fireworks internal credentials," in which "unauthorized third parties accessed environment variables used in assessment tasks for a small number of customer accounts."

In a press release, the company stated: "Based on our current investigations, we have not found any evidence of unauthorized access to customer models, datasets, training data, personal information, or the Fireworks security boundaries or inference traffic within our control."