Menlo’s Investment in Fireworks: The Runtime for Specialized Intelligence

Menlo Ventures · 3 hours ago

Menlo Ventures led a $1.5 billion Series D funding round for Fireworks, a platform for deploying and optimizing specialized AI models in production. Fireworks has grown daily token volume to 43 trillion tokens (nearly tripled since late 2024) and reached $1 billion annualized revenue, serving customers like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory. The funding reflects growing demand for inference infrastructure as companies increasingly deploy custom and open-source models alongside frontier models to balance cost, speed, and performance.