Writer, a leading generative AI company, has raised $200 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the startup at a staggering $1.9 billion. The round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from prominent investors including Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures.
Founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh, the company has grown rapidly, offering a full-stack generative AI platform with customizable solutions for various enterprise use cases. The new funding will be used to accelerate product development and cement Writer’s position as a leader in the enterprise generative AI space.
“At Writer, we’re not just creating AI models that can execute tasks, but developing advanced AI systems that deliver mission-critical enterprise work,” said Habib, the company’s CEO. “With this new funding, we’re laser-focused on delivering the next generation of autonomous AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and adaptable in highly complex, real-world enterprise scenarios.”
Writer’s platform includes its own family of models, Palmyra, for text generation, as well as features that connect business data sources to its models and the ability for customers to self-host Writer-created models. The company has also developed a model, Palmyra X 004, trained almost entirely on synthetic data, which cost just $700,000 to develop, a fraction of the estimated $4.6 million required for a comparably-sized OpenAI model.
The company’s current focus is on “AI agents” that can plan and execute workflows across systems and teams, as well as customizable AI guardrails and a suite of no-code development tools. Writer has already secured hundreds of clients, including prominent names like Mars, Ally Bank, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, L’Oréal, and Intuit.
“There’s a tremendous amount of engineering required to transform models into reliable business tools,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP of product and industries marketing at Salesforce. “Writer provides a refined, AI-powered solution that’s effective, easy to deploy, and has rapidly accelerated our workflows here at Salesforce. We’re excited to join them on this journey not only as an investor, but also as a customer.”
The latest funding round is a testament to the growing enthusiasm for generative AI in the venture capital community. According to a report from Accel, generative AI startups will receive 40% of all VC cash poured into cloud technologies this year, and in the first half of 2024, investments in generative AI startups topped $3.9 billion, not counting OpenAI’s $6.6 billion round.
As the generative AI market is projected to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within the next decade, Writer is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth and continue its mission of delivering innovative, enterprise-focused AI solutions.
