Writer, a “full-stack generative AI platform,” announced a major Series B funding round of $100 million.
Led by ICONIQ Growth and featuring contributions from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, Aspect Ventures, as well as clients like Accenture and Vanguard, the funding boosts Writer’s overall capital to $126 million and elevates its valuation to somewhere between $500 and $750 million.
Co-founder and CEO of Writer, May Habib, told TechCrunch, “Many enterprises are still just scratching the surface on generative AI, mostly building internal ‘CompanyX-GPT’-type of applications.”
She emphasized that her company offers expertise in generative AI, data gathering, and workflow automation.
Habib stated, “That’s 90% of the work. That’s the part that Writer makes much easier — and all of the data plus the large language model (LLM) can be hosted in an enterprise virtual private cloud, which makes it workable for enterprises.”
This comes weeks after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-centric variant of ChatGPT and related models.
Businesses have had a tough time fully investing in proprietary generative AI due to security concerns and fluctuating performance. In fact, many have banned employees from using it for fear of privacy concerns.
Enterprise AI
Writer joins a competitive landscape that includes industry giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection and some more niche platforms like Jasper.
However, Writer differentiates itself by training its models on non-copyrighted business writing and offering “smaller” and more “cost-effective” AI models.
Writer states, “Writer’s proprietary large language model (LLM) is the only in-production LLM trained primarily on business data.” The company maintains a policy of full transparency, allowing clients to examine the models’ code, features, and data.
Further, the models are never trained on customer data – which OpenAI also promised with Enterprise. This should alleviate the privacy concerns associated with using regular models like ChatGPT.
In a conversation with Forbes, Habib revealed some companies are switching from ChatGPT and similar models. to Writer due to concerns about the quality of outputs generated by ChatGPT.
She said, “We are seeing a lot of folks reach out as they’re kind of stuck in proof-of-concept purgatory. We’ve seen a few customers where they haven’t been able to take use cases to production because the generations weren’t high quality enough.”
“The challenge enterprises face is fine-tuning a good-at-all LLM on the ocean of data that they have and coming up with a model that can solve every problem,” Habib elaborated.
She also highlighted that Writer seamlessly integrates with popular workplace tools like Salesforce, Adobe, Google Chrome, Figma, Google Docs, Canva, Microsoft Word, and Outlook through plugins and extensions.
The San Francisco-based firm has already secured “hundreds” of enterprise clients, ranging from Intuit and United Healthcare to Spotify, L’Oréal, Uber, and Accenture.
With fresh capital, Writer aims to continue developing its industry-specific, text-generating AI models, potentially changing how enterprises view and employ generative AI.
