Writer wins $100M for its enterprise-focused generative AI platform

Investors can’t get enough of generative AI startups yet, especially those with clear business applications.

For example, Writer, which is developing what it describes as a “full-stack” generative AI platform for businesses, today announced it has raised $100 million in a funding round Series B led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital and Insight. Partners, Aspect Ventures and clients Writer Accenture and Vanguard.

Bringing Writer’s total to $126 million and valuing the company between $500 million and $750 million after the money, the new tranche will fund the development of Writer’s “industry-specific” text generation AI models, said May Habib, co-founder and CEO. TechCrunch.

“Many companies are still just scratching the surface of generative AI, primarily building internal ‘CompanyX-GPT’ type applications,” Habib said via email. “The most difficult and impactful use cases require a lot more know-how in augmented recovery generation, data collection and cleaning, and workflow construction, and they realize that this represents 90% of the work. This is the part that Writer makes much easier — and all the data as well as the large language model (LLM) can be hosted in an enterprise virtual private cloud, making it actionable for businesses.

Writer’s models can be connected to a company’s “knowledge base,” providing additional context.

Writer competes in a crowded field that includes not only OpenAI and its generative text AI rivals, like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, and Mistral AI, but also enterprise-focused generative platforms like Jasper, Cohere, and Typeface. All offer AI-powered tools to complete – or generate entirely from scratch – materials ranging from ads to copy for email campaigns, blog posts, flyers and websites.

So what sets Writer apart? Well, for one thing, it claims to have trained its fine-tuned models on commercial writings that are not protected by copyright, a key point in an era where the copyright status of copyright-generated works AI in the United States remains somewhat nebulous. Writer also claims that its models are “smaller” than average and therefore more “cost effective”; transparent in the sense that clients can inspect model code, functionality, and data; and never trained on customer data.

Like several of Writer’s competitors, Writer allows customers to connect its models to commercial data sources to improve their ability to research, fact-check, and answer questions. Additionally, Writer allows businesses to apply regulatory, legal, and branding rules across all models on its platform.

These capabilities have helped Writer gain “hundreds” of clients, including Intuit, United Healthcare, UiPath, Spotify, L’Oréal, Uber and Accenture. Writer, based in San Francisco with a team of 100 employees, says it has increased its revenue 10-fold over the past two years.