Fireworks AI Inc., a startup that helps developers train and run artificial intelligence models, has raised $1.5 billion in funding.
Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV jointly led the Series D round. Fireworks stated in its funding announcement Wednesday that they were joined by more than a half-dozen other backers, including Nvidia Corp. The company is now worth $17.5 billion.
The steep valuation is partly a reflection of Fireworks’ rapid sales growth, which recently propelled its annualized revenue past the $1 billion mark. The company’s customer base includes Samsung Electronics Co., GitLab Inc. and other major tech firms. Fireworks says that it processes more than 40 trillion tokens per day for its users.
Fireworks operates a cloud platform that developers can use to fine-tune, or customize, open-source AI models. It provides access to managed graphics card clusters under a usage-based pricing model. There’s also an AI agent that automates the AI training workflow. Developers can describe the task for which they wish to fine-tune a model, upload a training dataset and have the agent sort out the technical details.
An AI model includes settings called hyperparameters that define key features such as the number of artificial neurons it contains. According to Fireworks, its AI agent finds the specific combination of hyperparameters that maximizes a model’s output quality. When needed, it can also extend the user-provided training dataset with DPO files. Those are datasets that contain instructions on how a model should answer prompts.
Developers speed up training runs by splitting calculations across multiple chips. The way training parallelization is implemented varies from project to project. According to Fireworks, its platformsupportsfour different parallelization techniques that are each optimized for a different model type. Software teams can run all four side-by-side or use only one method at a time.
After customers fine-tune a model, they can host it using one of the two inference services offered by Fireworks. The first provides serverless environments that don’t require users to configure the underlying infrastructure. The company’s other inference service, Deployments, offers dedicated graphics card clusters. Fireworks says that they provide better performance than its serverless offering.
The Deployments interface also offers more customization options. Developers can adjust how the service performs autoscaling, the task of adding or removing hardware capacity when request volumes change. The service reduces models’ infrastructure requirements by compressing them using a method called quantization.
“Every company holds knowledge no one else has: its data, its workflows, its customers, its definition of quality,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Lin Qiao. “Fireworks turns that knowledge into specialized intelligence they own and can keep improving.”
Fireworks will use the proceeds from its funding round to expand its infrastructure and hire more engineers.
Photo:Fireworks
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