The writer has educated $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform.
The Series C round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures and Workday Ventures.
Writer CEO May Habib says the brand new money, which brings the startup's total revenue to $326 million, will probably be used for product development and “solidifying the corporate's leadership position within the enterprise generative AI category.”
“At Writer, we not only construct AI models that may perform tasks, but we develop advanced AI systems that perform mission-critical enterprise work,” Habib said in an announcement. “With this recent funding, we’re fully focused on delivering the following generation of autonomous AI solutions which can be secure, reliable and adaptable in highly complex, real-world business scenarios.”
Writer was founded in 2020 by Habib and Waseem AlShikh. The two previously launched Qordoba together, which helped corporations localize products in recent markets.
Writer has evolved over time right into a full-stack generative AI platform with products that will be customized for various enterprise use cases.
In 2023, Writer launched Palmyra, its own model family for text generation. Later that 12 months, the corporate introduced features that connect business data sources to its models, in addition to the power for patrons to self-host models created by Writer.
Just in October, Writer released a model, Palmyra X 004, that was trained almost exclusively on synthetic data. The writer claims that the event only cost $700,000 – compared Estimates put the value at $4.6 million for an OpenAI model of comparable size.
Writer's current focus is on “AI agents” that may plan and execute workflows across systems and teams, in addition to customizable AI guardrails and a set of no-code development tools.
Despite the extreme competition within the generative AI space, Writer has done quite well. The company has tons of of shoppers including Mars, Ally Bank, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, L'Oreal and Intuit.
“It takes an incredible amount of engineering effort to remodel models into reliable business tools,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP of product and industry marketing at Salesforce, in a press release. “Writer offers a classy, AI-powered solution that’s effective and straightforward to deploy and has quickly accelerated our workflows here at Salesforce. We are pleased to accompany you on this journey not only as an investor, but additionally as a customer.”
Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners and Vanguard also participated in Writer's Series C.
Writer's recent funding is one other sign that enterprise capitalists' enthusiasm for generative AI shows no sign of waning. After According to a report from Accel, generative AI startups will put 40% of all VC money into cloud technologies this 12 months. And in the primary half of 2024, investments in generative AI startups totaled over $3.9 billion, in response to Pitchbook – not including OpenAI's $6.6 billion round.
The generative AI market is projected generate over $1 trillion in sales inside the following decade. However, there are headwinds equivalent to privacy and copyright issues, in addition to architectural issues that cause phenomena equivalent to hallucinations.
