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Writer, an AI startup for enterprise tools for generative AI, has raised $200M in its Series C round of funding, catapulting the valuation to a whopping $1.9 billion. The round was co-led by among many top investors, including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth. Participating investors in the round also include Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures.
The financing round boosts Writer’s overall funding to $326 million, further strengthening its position in the generative AI space. According to a statement from CEO May Habib, “This new capital will be channeled into speeding up product developments and helping Writer further strengthen its leadership position in enterprise AI.”.
As Habib explained to me in a statement, in “Writer,” the company is doing much more than simply building an AI model to execute tasks: It builds sophisticated systems that handle mission-critical operations for enterprises. “With this fresh funding, we’re laser-focused on delivering the next generation of autonomous AI solutions that are secure, adaptable, and designed for the complexities of real-world business environments.”.
Founded by Habib and Waseem AlShikh who had co-founded Qordoba, a company helping businesses with product localization in 2020, Writer became a full-stack generative AI platform. The tools developed by the company may be customized for wide-ranging enterprise needs: automation of workflows; enhanced collaboration of distributed teams; and integration of flow of work with business data coming through other sources.
In 2023, the company developed its proprietary AI model family – Palmyra – to generate high-quality text. The firm further added these features, which integrate its models with enterprise data and allow customers to host the Writer bespoke models in-house. Most recently, the corporation launched Palmyra X 004 – an advanced model that has been trained mainly on synthetic data. Author claims that this model cost only $700,000 in development and, at that price tag, is but a fraction of the amount it would take to develop a model similar in nature to the one OpenAI developed-for $4.6 million.
The focus of the writer these days has been “AI agents” that can plan, execute, and optimize workflows across systems and teams using autonomous workflow planning. They are so designed to work well in complex environments where business is done, hence ensuring efficiency in operations. In addition to this, Writer is investing in customizable AI guardrails and no-code development tools, its intention to equip businesses with being able to integrate and manage AI solutions without having to delve into extensive technical expertise.
Despite heavy competition in the rapidly growing generative AI market, Writer has drawn a cross-section of high-profile customers. Some leading names on its customer list are Mars, Ally Bank, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, L’Oréal, and Intuit. Some of these companies have discovered that Writer can take AI models and make them practical business tools for efficiency and workflow acceleration.
“There is tremendous engineering involved in turning AI models into reliable business solutions,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP of product and industries marketing at Salesforce. “Writer has delivered an evolved AI-powered platform that is easy to deploy and significantly accelerates our workflows here at Salesforce. We are thrilled to support them not only as investors but as customers.”.
The other big investors who joined Writer’s Series C round were Accenture, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, and Vanguard. Such a set of diverse backers only underlines the growing demand for AI-driven solutions that can streamline business operations and provide measurable value.
This funding round is a success that further indicates that investors have more confidence in the future of generative AI. A recent report from Accel suggests that this year, generative AI startups are slated to capture 40% of all venture capital funding directed toward cloud technologies. In the first half of this year, generative AI startups raised over $3.9 billion, not counting the $6.6 billion raised by OpenAI in its most recent funding round.
According to estimates, generative AI will be the next market to explode in the following decade over $1 trillion in revenue. However, no sector is without challenges. Privacy worries, copyright violations, and the “hallucination” effect, a phenomenon of AI giving off inaccurate or nonsensical outputs, are likely to become major challenges. Yet, investment potential still is enormous in the AI space for industry transformation and innovation, which brings these investors close to companies like Writer that are building the next wave of solutions to fill the huge gaps in the enterprise use of AI.
The way forward for Writer is quite bright as it continues to see and strengthen its platform capabilities as differentiation continues to power in an increasingly competitive market. Such funding positions the company well to build on its early success and to continue innovating in the space of generative AI. As more enterprises seek to leverage AI to optimize their operations, Writer’s solutions might very well become an ingrained part of some of the world’s largest companies’ digital transformations.
