# Fireworks raises $1.5 billion Series D at $17.5 billion valuation

> Fireworks has raised a $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, one of the larger rounds in the AI infrastructure layer this year. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with existing backers Evantic, Lightspeed and NVIDIA joining in. It is a striking jump for a company whose valuation and scale have both climbed sharply since its last raise. The business underneath the numbers is inference, the unglamorous work of running AI models fast and cheaply once they are trained. Fireworks says it now serves more than 40 trillion tokens a day, up from 15 trillion at its previous round, and is running at a $1 billion-plus annualized revenue rate. Its customer list, which includes Uber, Shopify, GitLab and MongoDB, is the kind of roster that signals real production usage rather than experiments. The size of this round reflects a bet that the money in AI is moving from training frontier models to serving them at scale. If most companies buy intelligence rather than build it, the platforms that deliver tokens reliably and cheaply become critical plumbing, and investors are clearly paying up for that position.

_Section: [AI Funding Tracker](https://www.wortins.com/funding) · Source: Quartz · Published Sunday, July 19, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Fireworks has raised a $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, one of the larger rounds in the AI infrastructure layer this year. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with existing backers Evantic, Lightspeed and NVIDIA joining in. It is a striking jump for a company whose valuation and scale have both climbed sharply since its last raise. The business underneath the numbers is inference, the unglamorous work of running AI models fast and cheaply once they are trained. Fireworks says it now serves more than 40 trillion tokens a day, up from 15 trillion at its previous round, and is running at a $1 billion-plus annualized revenue rate. Its customer list, which includes Uber, Shopify, GitLab and MongoDB, is the kind of roster that signals real production usage rather than experiments. The size of this round reflects a bet that the money in AI is moving from training frontier models to serving them at scale. If most companies buy intelligence rather than build it, the platforms that deliver tokens reliably and cheaply become critical plumbing, and investors are clearly paying up for that position.

## Source

[Read the full story at Quartz](https://qz.com/fireworks-ai-series-d-fundraise-valuation-open-source-071626)

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