Generative AI Startup Writer Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding

The generative AI industry, Writer, a startup specializing in large language models, has announced a successful $100 million Series B funding round. This latest round of funding has propelled the company's valuation to a range between $500 million and $750 million, underscoring the growing demand for advanced AI-driven content generation solutions. The news comes as Writer faces increased competition from the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise, launched just last month, and other fast-growing unicorns like Typeface.

Writer's primary offering involves the use of its large language models to generate a wide range of content, including incident reports, emails, product descriptions, and executive summaries. Notably, Writer's CEO and co-founder, May Habib, revealed that some enterprise customers have migrated from Azure OpenAI to Writer due to concerns over the quality of content produced by ChatGPT. Over the past two years, Writer has experienced a tenfold increase in revenue, with a fourfold surge since the beginning of this year alone.

May Habib highlighted the challenges faced by some enterprise clients, referring to them as being "stuck in proof-of-concept purgatory," unable to transition their use cases to production due to suboptimal content generation quality.

Writer, founded in 2020 and previously featured on Forbes' AI 50 list, boasts an impressive roster of 150 enterprise customers, including major names like Uber, Spotify, Vanguard, Samsung, Accenture, and L'Oréal. The Series B funding round was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, and Aspect Ventures, bringing Writer's total funding to $126 million.

One key aspect of Writer's offering is its range of 14 models, varying in size from 128 million to 43 billion parameters. While these models are substantially smaller than OpenAI's GPT-4, which reportedly features about 1 trillion parameters, Writer's Palmyra models are versatile and fine-tuned for specific tasks. These models are trained on publicly available data sources like web pages, books, Wikipedia, GitHub, and transcribed YouTube content, with copyrighted material removed. Each company receives a customized version of the model, further fine-tuned on proprietary company-specific data such as financial reports and marketing copy.

Importantly, Writer's models comply with stringent privacy and security standards, including HIPAA and GDPR, making them suitable for a wide range of applications.

Writer's standout feature is its seamless integration with popular workplace tools such as Salesforce and Adobe. Users can embed Writer's app into various workspaces like Google Chrome, Figma, Google Docs, Canva, Microsoft Word, and Outlook by installing the Writer plugin or extension. This integration streamlines content creation and revision by automatically providing suggestions within these familiar platforms.

In an era where the demand for AI-generated content continues to surge, Writer's ability to enhance productivity and content quality is driving its rapid growth and industry recognition.