Generative AI startup “Writer” has secured a substantial $100 million in a series B funding round, positioning the company with a valuation between $500 million and $750 million. This funding comes hot on the heels of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise launch, intensifying the competition within the generative AI space alongside other rapidly growing ventures like Typeface.
Writer’s expansive language models have the capacity to generate diverse content, encompassing incident reports, emails, product descriptions, executive summaries, and more. This puts Writer in direct competition with ChatGPT Enterprise, striving to offer superior quality outputs. According to Writer CEO and co-founder May Habib, some enterprise customers have shifted from Azure OpenAI to Writer due to the perceived higher quality of generated content. The startup has experienced a remarkable revenue surge, increasing tenfold over the past two years and quadrupling since the beginning of this year.
Established in 2020, Writer earned a spot on Forbes’ AI 50 list earlier this year and has garnered 150 enterprise customers, including prominent names like Uber, Spotify, Vanguard, Samsung, Accenture, and L’Oreal. The recent funding round was led by Iconiq Growth and saw participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, and Aspect Ventures, bringing the total funding for Writer to $126 million.
Writer’s offerings consist of 14 models of varying sizes, ranging from 128 million parameters to 43 billion parameters. These models, named Palmyra, were trained on curated public data sources such as web pages, books, Wikipedia, GitHub, and transcribed video content from YouTube, all meticulously filtered to remove copyrighted material. Each company receives a tailored, fine-tuned version of the model, incorporating proprietary company-specific data.
The key selling point for Writer lies in its seamless integration with popular tools such as Salesforce and Adobe, allowing the app to be embedded into various workspaces. This integration is facilitated through Writer’s plugin or extension, automatically providing content suggestions and markup within platforms like Google Chrome, Figma, Google Docs, Canva, Microsoft Word, and Outlook.
In a competitive landscape, where generative AI is evolving rapidly, Writer’s focus on enhanced content quality and seamless integration could position it as a formidable contender in the market, offering viable alternatives to existing solutions like ChatGPT Enterprise.