May Habib looked at the enterprise AI market and made a contrarian bet: instead of building on top of OpenAI like everyone else, Writer would train its own language models. Why? Because Vanguard does not want its customer data flowing through OpenAI's servers. Deloitte does not want its consulting methodology in someone else's training set. Writer raised $226 million and is valued at $1.9 billion. The company is betting that enterprises will pay a premium for AI they control — an AI that knows their brand voice, follows their compliance rules, and keeps their data private. In a world where every startup is an OpenAI wrapper, Writer is one of the few building its own engine.
Founded
2020
HQ
San Francisco, California
Total Raised
$226 million
Founder
May Habib, Waseem Alshikh
Status
Private (valued at $1.9B as of 2024)
Website
writer.comTHE ORIGIN STORY
May Habib (a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley) and Waseem Alshikh (an NLP researcher) founded Writer in 2020 to solve a specific enterprise problem: large companies need AI that follows their brand guidelines, complies with regulations, and does not leak proprietary data. Instead of building on OpenAI, they trained their own models — giving enterprises control over the AI stack.
The bet: enterprises will pay more for AI they control than for AI they rent from OpenAI.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Writer builds enterprise-grade generative AI — the company trains its own large language models (Palmyra family) rather than wrapping OpenAI or Anthropic APIs. Writer's platform lets enterprises deploy AI across their organization with guardrails: brand voice consistency, compliance rules, and data security.
Revenue comes from enterprise SaaS contracts. Customers include Vanguard, L'Oreal, Accenture, and Deloitte.
THE PRODUCTS
Writer Platform (enterprise AI), Palmyra LLMs (proprietary language models), Writer AI Studio (custom AI app builder), Knowledge Graph (enterprise knowledge management)
HOW THEY GREW
Own the enterprise AI stack. Writer positions itself as the secure, controllable AI platform for regulated industries — finance, healthcare, legal — where using OpenAI raises data privacy concerns.
The strategy: win enterprises that cannot or will not send data to third-party AI providers, then expand across their organizations.
THE HARD PART
Competing with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on model quality while being 1,000x smaller. Writer trains its own models, which requires significant R&D investment.
The models need to be good enough that enterprises choose Writer over GPT-4 with a wrapper. The pitch is control and security, not raw intelligence — but if the model quality gap widens, that pitch gets harder.
MONEY TRAIL
Series A
2021 · Led by
$21M raised
Series B
2023 · Led by
$100M raised
Series C
2024 · Led by
$200.0B raised
WHO BACKED THEM
ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Insight Partners, Balderton Capital, Salesforce Ventures
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Head-to-Head
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