Candid with Index: In Conversation with Fireworks’ Lin Qiao

As a girl growing up in China, Lin Qiao spent hours in her father’s office. A mechanical engineer, he designed massive cargo ships, and Lin would sit with his blueprints, tracing the angles and studying how each piece solved a problem.

Decades later, Lin is picking up where her father left off, only in a different medium. Where he built infrastructure that moved the physical economy, she’s building the infrastructure that moves the intelligent one. At Meta, she led the team behind PyTorch, the open-source framework that became the foundation nearly all modern AI is built on. And now at Fireworks, she’s building the infrastructure companies use to run, customize, and own that intelligence.

When we met Lin, she painted a compelling vision for the future of AI. Instead of intelligence belonging to a few big labs and everyone else renting it, she saw a world where every company builds specialized intelligence of its own, harnessing its data, workflows, and customer context to build, serve, and scale the models that matter most to its business.

That specialized approach is fast becoming the enterprise default. Since we first invested in Fireworks last October, the company’s ARR has grown from $280 million to well over $1 billion, while daily tokens served have nearly tripled, from 15 trillion to more than 43 trillion. Around two-thirds of those tokens now come from specialized models, reflecting how, as open models improve, enterprises like Meta, Uber, and Shopify are increasingly choosing them for the flexibility, economics, and performance they offer.

Today we’re excited to support Fireworks again, co-leading a $1.5 billion Series D alongside our friends at Atreides Management and TCV. This round will help Lin and the team scale their platform, expand their global compute infrastructure, and help many more enterprises build specialized intelligence of their own.

To mark the news, our partner Sahir Azam caught up with Lin to talk through her journey, from her early days at IBM and LinkedIn to the insight she saw at Meta that led her to start Fireworks, to the democratized intelligence she sees as the future of AI.