San Francisco-headquartered generative AI writing platform Writer has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Iconiq Growth, it announced in a statement today. The three-year-old startup was reportedly valued at over $500 million in the round. WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, and Aspect Ventures also participated in the round, along with the company’s customers; Accenture and Vanguard.
The round takes Writer’s total financing to date to a little over $125 million. The startup had raised its $21 million Series A led by Insight Partners in 2021.
Founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem Alshikh, Writer is focused on enterprises and claims to be different from standard large language models in multiple ways. In their own words, Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform and is the first of its kind to be built from ground-up for enterprise.
The platform is built on Writer’s own group of LLMs, known as Palmyra, which the startup claims are faster and more cost-effective than larger models, and are fine-tuned for specific industries, like healthcare.
But what sets it apart from potential alternatives is what’s built around the LLMs to deliver the final product: three key components — a knowledge graph that connects Writer’s models with a business’s data sources, AI guardrails that enforce a company’s regulatory, legal, inclusivity, and brand rules, and an application layer that offers a wide range of interfaces, including pre-built templates, chatbot, and the option to create templates.
The platform also offers integrations with various other products, including Chrome, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Figma, in addition to providing API access for embedding within different applications and workflows.
May Habib, the co-founder and CEO of Writer, said, “Our foundation models are best-in-class, and they’re auditable, inspectable, and hostable — but it’s not just about the models. Any CIO who’s tried to build an internal generative AI application will tell you that the last mile of quality is the hardest. And we help them nail that, at scale, dozens and dozens of times as they build AI applications and assistants that enable their entire organization. And our customer’s desire to invest in the company is a true testament to the value we’re providing.”
Writer is priced at $18 per month per user, but for access to the knowledge graph and other customization features, businesses have to opt for the enterprise plan, which has custom pricing.
In terms of use cases, Writer distinguishes itself from the majority of AI platforms by providing extensive writing support across various organizational functions, encompassing support, operations, product, sales, HR, marketing, and more. This multifaceted support serves to expedite growth, enhance productivity, and uphold governance within enterprises. It caters to different industries, including technology, financial services, healthcare, retail, and ecommerce.
Doug Pepper, general partner at Iconiq Growth, who is joining company’s board as a result of this investment, said, “Writer’s ability to apply the power of generative AI to many different departments within the enterprise—from marketing to product, human resources, and more—has proven to be a game changer for C-suite leaders. We believe that generative AI usage within enterprises is hitting an inflection point, and Writer stands out to us as a leader in providing a full-stack and secure platform to deliver on AI’s incredible promise.”
The startup plans to use the latest funds to further invest in its own LLMs, and to add add agent and multimodal capabilities to its LLMs, it said in a statement. Writer also claimed that its has grown its revenue ten-fold in the last two years and has over 150 percent revenue retention.
While it maybe one of the top AI writing products for enterprise customers, Writer faces increased competition. OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Enterprise, Cohere launched Coral, and various other products, including Jasper, are also focusing on enterprise customers. These alternatives may not be as specialized in the use cases Writer aims to serve, they provide additional choices for customers. It would be interesting to see how Writer performs in this extensive competition.
