Another GenAI big money: Enterprise-level copywriter "make-up artist" Writer received 9-digit financing in one fell swoop

Text: Jessica Editor: VickyXiao

In September, the beginning of autumn, the investment enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence continues. Today, Writer, an AI startup that provides full-stack content creation solutions for enterprises, announced the completion of a US$100 million Series B financing, with a total post-investment valuation of more than US$500 million.

Writer’s funding round was led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, Aspect Ventures, and Writer clients Accenture and Vanguard. In the past two years, Writer has achieved 10-fold revenue growth and achieved a net revenue retention rate of more than 150%. It has also accumulated hundreds of large enterprise customers such as Spotify, L'Oréal, Uber, Handshake, Hubspot, and Deloitte.

Core Products

Writer, an AI text generation tool, was born in San Francisco in 2020 specifically for the needs of content marketers. It has now developed into an artificial intelligence platform that helps enterprises use large language models to generate cross-department documents and content, including editing, operations, products, sales, human resources, marketing, etc., aiming to maximize creativity in business processes for customers. and increase productivity.

Company CEO May Habib said: "Unlike other companies that focus on basic model building or ready-to-use applications that only apply to a small set of use cases, Writer is the only full-stack generative AI platform with the quality and security that enterprises require. .”

To realize this product vision, Writer mainly relies on its three key modules:

**Own large language model PALMYRA: **After training in formal business copywriting, Writer's own large language model PALMYRA contains a total of 1 trillion tokens. It focuses on helping those "who have to make content", enabling team-focused content management rather than general knowledge. This makes models smaller, faster and cost-effective. Users can use Writer to efficiently implement a series of professional content styles: for example, upload speech recordings to generate summary manuscripts, write blogs and marketing emails based on titles, and generate product descriptions, job descriptions, advertising plans, insurance claim documents, etc. based on requirements.

Additionally, Writer's LLM has been fine-tuned for specific industries, such as healthcare and financial services, to more specifically address industry needs and regulations, and has achieved high scores in key benchmarks such as Stanford HELM and PubMedQA.

It’s worth noting that PALMYRA’s training data contains no intellectual property or copyright-protected content — a critical point at a time when the copyright status of AI-generated works in the United States remains somewhat unclear, especially for those concerned about data privacy. And for companies with intellectual property issues. Writer also promises that customer data will always remain private, will not be shared or used for model training, and is completely safe and auditable.

**Knowledge Graph:**Writer's knowledge graph can be easily integrated with customers' key information sources and documents to output more accurate answers and important insights. This means that Writer’s generative artificial intelligence platform not only relies on the knowledge of the model itself, but can also access and integrate the company’s key information and data, providing “tailor-made” solutions when answering questions, analyzing data, researching business, and creating summaries. ” valuable insights. This ability to connect and integrate helps ensure that the content generated is more aligned with an organization's business needs and regulations.

**AI guardrails (guardrail technology): **Writer technology ensures content is compliant and accurate by applying enterprise rules to all work, whether manually created or generated by AI, avoiding lengthy manual editing and review cycle. Not only can it effectively avoid sensitive words, discriminatory and offensive words, but it can also ensure the consistency of corporate style and tone, thereby saving time and resources and improving work efficiency.

Competitive Advantage

In the fierce competition of hundreds of models, Writer's strong opponents include not only leading generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, AI21 Labs and Mistral AI, but also Jasper, Cohere and Typeface, which are also targeting the enterprise level. All of these platforms offer AI-based authoring tools that generate a variety of documents, from digital ads to email marketing copy, blog posts, flyers, and website content.

So, what are the advantages of Writer? As mentioned earlier, it uses its own large language model to ensure high quality, efficiency, and data privacy and security. At the same time, Writer’s model has fewer API prices, reducing costs. In addition, Writer provides private deployment options that enable customers to deploy and manage models in their own environment, and customers can inspect the model's code, features, and data. Writer will also fine-tune its model to ensure that the generated content is more in line with industry standards and regulations to meet the needs of different enterprise customers.

Together, these features ensure model reliability, cost-effectiveness, and data security and accuracy, making Writer stand out in the market as a powerful generative artificial intelligence solution provider.

Product Pricing

Currently, Writer has two pricing models for individuals and small teams, as well as enterprise customization. The former costs $18 per month and $162 per year, supports up to 5 users, and includes content generation, pre-built templates, sound summary processing, Ask Writer interface, email, basic administrator tools and other functions. In addition to the above functions, the latter also includes advanced functions such as support for multiple teams, API access, data integration, in-depth customized templates, advanced security support, etc. Please consult the customized service price.

Founding Member

Headquartered in San Francisco and currently employing about 100 people, Writer was co-founded by CEO May Habib and current CTO Waseem Alshikh. The two first met in 2013 and have been collaborating on complex language processing for nearly ten years. Writer is not their first company.

In 2015, they co-founded Qordoba, an AI software company that is somewhat similar to the predecessor of Writer and is dedicated to helping companies write clearer, more consistent and more consistent brand content. It received US$11.5 million in Series B financing in 2018. In 2020, the two business partners jointly founded Writer again, bringing with them a wealth of experience in cooperation with large enterprise customers, Transformer model building, and natural language processing technology.

May Habib said that Writer’s future development plans include developing industry-specific large language models, AI agents, enterprise multi-modal LLMs, and expanding international business.

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