Writer Announces $100M Series B to Help Deliver Generative AI to the Enterprise
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 18, 2023 -- Writer, a leading full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises, announced its Series B funding round of $100 million today. The round is being led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital and Insight Partners, who led the Series A, and Aspect Ventures, who led the Seed. In addition, this round includes participation from several Writer customers such as Accenture and Vanguard. With this financing, ICONIQ Growth’s Doug Pepper has joined the board.
The Series B funding will be used to further invest in the company’s own industry-specific large language models (LLMs), and to add agent and multimodal capabilities to its LLMs. Writer is the only generative AI platform built from the ground-up for the enterprise. It empowers the entire organization including support, operations, product, sales, HR, marketing, and more, to accelerate growth, increase productivity, and ensure governance.
“Our foundation models are best-in-class, and they're auditable, inspectable, and hostable — but it’s not just about the models,” said May Habib, CEO and co-founder of Writer. “Any CIO who's tried to build an internal generative AI application will tell you that the last mile of quality is the hardest. And we help them nail that, at scale, dozens and dozens of times as they build AI applications and assistants that enable their entire organization. And our customer’s desire to invest in the company is a true testament to the value we're providing.”
Unlike other generative AI solutions, Writer’s full-stack platform was built to enable its customers to seamlessly embed generative AI into their business processes. The platform includes Writer-built LLMs, Knowledge Graph to integrate with business data sources, and an application layer of chat interfaces, prebuilt templates, and composable UI options. Writer models are top scoring on key benchmarks like Stanford HELM and can be self-hosted, which allows customers to get the security benefits of building their own model with the speed to value benefits of a powerful end-to-end solution.
“Writer’s ability to apply the power of generative AI to many different departments within the enterprise—from marketing to product, human resources, and more—has proven to be a game changer for C-suite leaders,” said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Growth. “We believe that generative AI usage within enterprises is hitting an inflection point, and Writer stands out to us as a leader in providing a full-stack and secure platform to deliver on AI’s incredible promise.”
WndrCo founding partner Jeffrey Katzenberg shared, “Writer is a powerful platform for maximizing both creativity and productivity in the workplace. With Writer’s generative AI capabilities, organizations can empower their teams to be strong storytellers in all facets of their communication.” Justin Wexler from WndrCo added, “We have high conviction that Writer’s platform will continue to resonate among the Fortune 500 and beyond.”
“Writer stands out as a company in the incredibly noisy world of AI that has a clear, proven business model, traction with leading global enterprise customers and strong revenue growth. May, Waseem, and their team are building something truly unique and we are excited to partner with them as Writer grows in Europe,” said Rana Yared, general partner at Balderton Capital.
“Writer's full-stack platform enables Vanguard to combine the expertise, creativity, and knowledge of our teams with the latest advancements in generative AI technology, boosting productivity,” said Nitin Tandon, chief information officer of Vanguard.
Writer has grown revenues by 10x in the last two years and has over 150% net revenue retention. As a proven solution with several years in the market, Writer was well-positioned to help enterprises around the world leverage AI when new tools democratized access to the technology.
In a study of over 50 enterprise customers, Writer was found to return an average of 7.5 hours of productivity per employee per week. Writer takes a full-stack approach that enables diverse use cases across the entire organization, not just solely on foundation models or an out-of-the-box app that only generates content.
Writer announced its $21 million Series A round in 2021 and raised $5 million in seed funding in 2020.
To learn more about the Writer platform, visit writer.com.
About Writer
Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We empower your people—support, operations, product, sales, HR, marketing, and more—to accelerate growth, increase productivity, and ensure governance. The platform transforms work by embedding AI into any business process and making it available everywhere people work. We pair Writer-built LLMs with Knowledge Graph, which integrates with your business data sources, to deliver high-quality outputs and insights. Writer automatically enforces your AI guardrails so work is compliant, accurate, inclusive, and on-brand, whether it's created by your people or AI. Our flexible application layer of chat interfaces, prebuilt templates, and composable UI options serves use cases across every function. Visit writer.com.
Source: Writer
