BlockBeats News, July 16th, Nvidia-backed AI cloud service startup Fireworks has completed a $1.5 billion financing round, with a valuation of $17.5 billion. This round of financing was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Nvidia, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Fireworks primarily hosts and runs open-source AI models for developers. The current annual revenue has exceeded $1 billion, five times higher than the same period last year. The company's CEO, Lin Qiao, stated that more and more enterprises are turning to open-source models due to cost pressures. The equivalent quality models provided by Fireworks cost 5 to 10 times less than closed-source models.

Fireworks supports models from companies such as DeepSeek, MiniMax, and ZhiPu AI, and has partnered with Microsoft to provide services leveraging over 20 computing power providers, including Microsoft. The company currently processes approximately 400 trillion AI Tokens per day and has started offering GPUs for training AI models.

About half of Fireworks' revenue last year came from the AI programming company Cursor. The customer base is now more diversified, with other clients including Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB. The new financing will be used to purchase more GPUs, expand the sales team, and hire technical staff. The company plans to increase its workforce from about 200 to 600 employees by the end of 2026.