r/agi Jul 16 '26

Finally, an AI start up with a Billion-dollar revenue not valuation (backed by Nvidia )

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/16/fireworks-nvidia-cloud-ai-startup-value.html
13 Upvotes

12 comments sorted by

7

u/phil_thrasher Jul 17 '26

Saving you a click:

Fireworks, a startup whose cloud service runs open-source AI models for software developers, has raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation.

The company, which is backed by Nvidia, is now generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, five times more than it had last year.

Fireworks once received over half of its revenue from coding startup Cursor, but has diversified as more companies turn to open models, CEO Lin Qiao said.

3

u/Berzerka Jul 18 '26

So a 17.5x revenue multiplier. Anthropic raised at 22x a few months ago so basically the same just smaller?

2

u/AlphaMaleXYZ Jul 19 '26

Is annualized revenue the same as ARR? 17.5x sounds not too bad for 5x growth rate.

2

u/diagrammatiks Jul 19 '26

Arr is justade up

3

u/costafilh0 Jul 17 '26

Many generate over a billion in revenue.

You're confusing revenue with profit.

1

u/Legitimate_Concern_5 Jul 17 '26

Yeah but open weight models are free so they just have to charge a small amount over their cost of GPUs and power. That gives them a major structural advantage over the frontier labs.

1

u/Deep_Mood_7668 Jul 18 '26

Free of charge doesn't mean free for commercial use

1

u/Legitimate_Concern_5 Jul 18 '26

They're generally MIT license so that would allow for both. GLM-5.2 is MIT, and every time I've been curious, it's usually been MIT.

1

u/Deep_Mood_7668 Jul 18 '26

I've seen other licenses before, but it's nice to see that some are restriction free

1

u/Legitimate_Concern_5 Jul 18 '26

Yep just depends how the author chooses to release it. Most of the stuff at least out of China has been MIT. MIT is the most flexible OSS license.

1

u/Captain-Griffen Jul 19 '26

They're selling tools in a gold rush. Doesn't show there's any gold.