Generative AI Startup Writer Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding
Writer, a generative AI startup, has announced that it raised $100 million in a series B funding round. The funding round values the company between $500 million and $750 million. Writer’s large language models are capable of generating a wide range of content, from incident reports to executive summaries, making it a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise and other unicorns in the market.
According to Writer CEO and co-founder May Habib, some enterprise customers have switched from Azure OpenAI to Writer because the quality of outputs generated by ChatGPT was not high enough. The startup’s revenue has seen a significant increase, growing tenfold in the last two years and fourfold since the beginning of this year.
Writer boasts an impressive list of 150 enterprise customers, including Uber, Spotify, Vanguard, Samsung, Accenture, and L’Oreal. The series B funding round was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Insight Partners, and Aspect Ventures. With this latest funding, Writer has accumulated a total funding amount of $126 million.
Models and Training
Writer offers a variety of models, ranging from 128 million parameters to 43 billion parameters. These models, known as Palmyra, have been trained on publicly available data from sources such as web pages, books, Wikipedia, Github, and transcribed video content from YouTube. The public data is carefully filtered to remove copyrighted content.
Each company that uses Writer’s services receives a separate fine-tuned version of the model, specifically trained on their proprietary data, such as financial reports and marketing copy. The models are also designed to comply with privacy and security standards, including HIPAA and GDPR.
Writer has recently released PalmyraMed, a model specifically trained on public medical datasets for healthcare applications. The startup’s smaller fine-tuned models offer faster speeds and are catered to performing specific tasks at a fraction of the cost of other large language models.
Integration and Plugin
Writer’s main selling point is its integration with popular tools used by employees, such as Salesforce and Adobe. The Writer app can be embedded into various workspaces, including Google Chrome, Figma, Google Docs, Canva, Microsoft Word, and Outlook. Users can install Writer’s plugin or extension, which automatically provides suggestions and markup for content.
According to Habib, Writer aims to assist enterprises with the last mile of model tuning, data preparation, and integration into existing workflows. By providing seamless integration and valuable suggestions, Writer seeks to enhance productivity and efficiency for its enterprise customers.
As the generative AI market continues to thrive, Writer’s successful funding round and growing customer base indicate a strong position within the industry. With its advanced language models and focus on integration, Writer is poised to drive innovation and support enterprises in content generation.
