She Saw the AI Revolution Coming — and Created a Company to Help People Use It Easily. Now It's Worth Half a Billion Dollars. Lin Qiao's company Fireworks AI lets customers build generative AI products with simple prompts.
By Kim Kavin
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
More than once, Lin Qiao has seen up-close how, every few years, new technology drives massive transformation. She graduated in 2005 with a Ph.D. in distributive systems and database management systems, worked as a software engineer for IBM, went to work for LinkedIn, and then joined Facebook (now Meta). At each stop, she saw the cycles play out in real time.
Cloud computing changed everything. Mobile computing did, too. When she got to Facebook, the company was running out of data storage — because new Artificial Intelligence systems were allowing people to create much more content, and the AI was making a lot of stuff itself. Video conferencing used AI. So did search-ranking engines. All kinds of services were coming online, backed by AI. "It was clear to me that AI would be powering the next generation of technology," she says. "There's a lot of AI that's happening without people realizing it."
Related: The Future Founder's Guide to Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI can create images, text, audio and more. It can learn from the data it collects, and then create even more. In October 2022 — a month before ChatGPT was released, showing what Generative AI technology could do to information, jobs and more, for better and for worse — Qiao saw an order of magnitude increase in productivity and decision-making around building generative AI products. People were realizing this technology's power and trying to do more things with it. She wanted to give developers a customizable backbone to make that work easier. To do so, she launched her company Fireworks AI. It lets customers build generative AI products with simple prompts, or helps enterprise customers build in more complex ways. One customer created a legal assistant to find precedents. The same tech could be used to teach people how to speak a foreign language. It could generate cartoons or postcards or more artistic layouts — basically, it could be used in whatever way people could imagine.
"This market on GenAI is so fast-moving that the timeline is heavily compressed from people doing a prototype to early scaling and large-scale production, in all different segments of industry," she says. "What we provide is the operational infrastructure for application engineers and product developers."
All of this made Qiao a finalist on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.
In the past year, you announced big partnerships with companies that provide hardware, data and models. You're also now working with the venture capital firms Benchmark and Sequoia.
We just did our Series B this year. We raised $55 million toward a total of $77 million, with a valuation of $552 million. And starting in February 2024, the platform's user base grew from 12,000 developers to 23,000.
What happened that caused that growth to skyrocket?
Companies started giving people ways to do more with GenAI products, and people started doing more with GenAI products. A lot of users converted from playing with images to seriously using this in production, to power the new application or product experience.
The other reason is that people are more aware of Fireworks AI. We rolled out a self-serve platform. You don't even need to talk to us. You can try it out yourself. That really brought us a lot of people too.
It sounds like you developed the right technology to be ready at the moment, when the business community and the public both embraced GenAI technology.
That's what happened in the past year. We have everything from digital natives to traditional businesses, and in both, this market was moving faster.
I think there's an interesting emotion of fear. There's fear of what AI will do to our lives. Is it going to be good or bad? It's a lot of questions at the same time. But on the other hand, the business owners realized that if they're not moving fast enough, they're going to be obsolete. They won't be as fast as their competitors, and they're going to lose the game.
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