From a chance Twitter connection to a $1.9 billion valuation, Writer’s path to becoming a major force in enterprise AI reflects both the rapid evolution of language technology and the power of focused innovation. The company, which recently secured $200 million in Series C funding, has come a long way from its origins in machine translation.
A Twitter Connection That Changed Everything
Over a decade ago, in a small Twitter community of computer scientists in Dubai, May Habib noticed an intriguing post about project algorithms and Java. The author was Waseem AlShikh, a Syrian developer who had taught himself English while pursuing computer science in Lebanon.
“I can’t waste two years studying just language,” Waseem recalls of his college days. “Not my thing. I can’t do it. I want to move fast.” This drive led him to develop his own summarization tool, refining it through trial and error. “I started getting a lot of A’s,” he says, describing how he condensed 2,000-page textbooks into 100 pages of essential content.
His first attempt with a rule-based model wasn’t successful. “I know it’s failed because I used that tool to summarize a few courses and when I end up study all the summarization, I went to the exam,” Waseem explains. “Well, it was not great.” After three months of developing more advanced statistical models, his results improved dramatically. “I finished the whole four years working at a restaurant, saving money, improving the software, and studying the summary. So from a 2000-page book, I only study a hundred pages.”
That early innovation caught Habib’s eye, leading to a meeting six months after their online connection. The partnership that followed would eventually transform enterprise AI.
From Qordoba to Writer
The pair first collaborated on Qordoba, focusing on maintaining consistent language across organizations. Their connection to machine translation ran deep – they were involved when Google published the landmark “Attention is All You Need” paper, introducing the transformer architecture.
“What folks sometimes forget, or don’t know, is the Attention paper and the researchers that had those incredible algorithmic breakthroughs really were working on machine translation problems,” Habib says. “And so we were in the heart of it. And it was very, very hard to unsee what we saw.”
As language models advanced, they saw an opportunity to address broader enterprise challenges through AI, leading to Writer’s launch in March 2020 with a Series Seed round.
Their timing proved prescient. The company’s latest funding round of $200 million, led by strategic investors including Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, and Workday, values Writer at $1.9 billion. This investment arrives as Writer’s enterprise AI platform gains significant traction, with over 250 customers including major corporations like T-Mobile, Hilton, Mars, L’Oréal, and Uber.
The Full-Stack Approach
Writer distinguished itself by developing its own family of language models, Palmyra, rather than relying on third-party solutions. “We’ve been doing this literally longer than just about anybody,” Habib notes. “And the ability to maintain, that is really just a matter of strategy, right. We have to remain state-of-the-art and push the boundaries on data and algorithms and computing.”
The company’s latest model, featuring 120 billion parameters, has outperformed larger competitors in independent tests like the HELM benchmark. This success challenges industry assumptions about the need for massive resources in AI development.
“I don’t think I need a hundred billion [dollars] and 5,000 people to build a model. I think that’s more or less wasteful and reckless,” Waseem states. “Strong opinion, I know. But we have resources and we have smart people. We can get it done.”
Writer’s technical achievements include the development of graph-based RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) for improved data access and context understanding. The company has also introduced Writing in the Margins, addressing the “lost in the middle” problem in handling extensive data.
The platform’s evolution in 2024 brought several specialized models:
– Palmyra X 004 for enhanced reasoning
– Palmyra Creative for innovative thinking and writing across professions
– Domain-specific versions for healthcare (Palmyra Med) and financial services (Palmyra Fin)
– Palmyra Vision for multimodal capabilities with advanced image and video processing
Writer has taken an innovative approach to model training, using synthetic data to develop Palmyra 004. This method has proven more cost-effective than traditional approaches while maintaining high accuracy. The company utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and rigorous verification processes to ensure synthetic data quality while addressing privacy concerns.
AI Studio and Development Tools
The launch of Writer’s AI Studio has democratized AI app development within organizations. The platform includes no-code tools, the Writer Framework, and the Writer API, enabling teams to create custom AI applications without extensive technical expertise. The company also introduced a Slack integration, bringing AI-powered chat apps directly into daily workflows.
Writer’s development tools are supported by customizable AI guardrails and a comprehensive control plane for managing AI applications centrally. The platform excels in function calling and parallel function calling, despite its relatively smaller model size compared to industry giants.
Qualcomm’s AI Transformation
When Qualcomm began searching for an AI solution in 2022, Senior Manager of Marketing Brent Summers had specific requirements in mind. “We needed an AI vendor that wasn’t just an application wrapper, but really a full-stack platform. We wanted a vendor with LLMs that they would stand behind, a RAG solution that could incorporate our own corporate data, and ability to support the surfaces where we work like Word, Outlook, and Figma,” says Summers.
The company’s AI Council carefully vetted Writer’s capabilities. “When we vetted Writer through our AI Council, we found many strengths to the platform. Writer is enterprise-ready, takes privacy and security seriously, and can protect our IP. Plus the platform is customizable enough to support our breadth of use cases and it integrates with the tools we already use, making it incredibly easy for our people to adopt,” explains Don McGuire, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Qualcomm Incorporated.
The implementation has been transformative. “Writer has helped create happier employees here at Qualcomm. Happier employees are more productive, more creative, and more satisfied with their job,” McGuire adds.
Sprout Social’s Success Story
For Sprout Social, a leader in social media management serving over 30,000 global brands, the journey with Writer began in early 2024. VP of Marketing Marino Fresch and Director of Revenue Marketing Program Management Ryan Evans recognized AI’s potential to transform marketing operations.
“Writer is purpose-built rather than just a chat app,” says Fresch. “It has both well-designed prebuilt apps for popular use cases to enable quick adoption and ability to build custom apps for our unique use cases. The entire Writer platform, including AI Studio and Knowledge Graph, helps us achieve scale while maintaining our high-quality bar.”
The company has leveraged Writer’s Knowledge Graph to create a central data hub, making industry statistics and comprehensive data reports readily accessible. “Things change so quickly in our industry that it can be a challenge to share the most updated resources internally and with our customers,” explains Fresch. “Now, with Writer Knowledge Graph, we’re able to pull the most accurate information with little lift and swiftly repurpose it.”
One of their most notable achievements has been in SEO content creation. Previously, their in-house SEO team spent up to 8 hours crafting detailed briefs for freelancers. With Writer, they’ve streamlined this process significantly. “Our ability to create high-quality SEO content at scale was limited by the bandwidth of our in-house SEO team,” says Fresch. “With Writer, we’ve been able to speed up the production of SEO content by 68%. Our SEO experts spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on strategic work that only they can do.”
The platform’s agility also helped Sprout Social capitalize on market opportunities. “A competitor went out of business, and that created a gap in the market,” Fresch notes. “Writer helped us quickly create a high volume of SEO content focused on alternatives to this competitor. We went from not ranking to being in the top three for relevant searches. We would not have been able to take advantage of this opportunity without Writer.”
Culture and Values at the Core
Despite the technical achievements, Writer maintains a strong focus on company culture. “Product is only 20% of the whole company,” Waseem explains. “Having the people, having the team, and making sure they have the same values — because there’s a lot of hard work — isn’t something you can disconnect with.”
The company’s three core values – Connect, Challenge, and Own – have helped shape its culture as it grew to 300 employees, earning recognition on Inc.’s 2024 Best Workplaces list. The company emphasizes the importance of being solution-oriented, focusing on creating solutions that meet specific customer needs rather than simply offering tools.
Writer was recently named as an Emerging Leader in the 2024 Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies, earning top positions in three categories: Generative AI Model Providers, Generative AI Engineering, and AI Knowledge Management Apps / General Productivity. The company ranked among the highest generative AI model providers for Future Potential, surpassing many established tech giants.
Writer’s vision extends beyond current capabilities. The team is developing self-evolving models that can learn new information in real-time without full retraining cycles. They’re also advancing towards systems capable of autonomous operation.
“The way we define [reasoning] here at Writer is can we actually build a system, and can that system do two specific tasks — self-organize and self-assembly — and can do it always in the correct way at scale,” Waseem explains.
Waseem envisions AI development progressing in stages, from system-to-human interactions to systems where humans are in the loop, and eventually to systems that can operate without direct human supervision. “Seeing this kind of use case is just fascinating to me,” Waseem says about a healthcare customer’s success. “We’re really changing people’s lives. Maybe we’re not seeing it inside when we build the models or we create the tools. But we have amazing customers coming and taking this technology and willing to put it in the front and adopt very complex use cases on it and put it in production.”
The company’s journey from a Twitter connection to a billion-dollar valuation demonstrates that effective enterprise AI solutions don’t always require massive resources – just focused innovation and a clear understanding of customer needs.