San Francisco-based AI startup, Writer, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $126 million. The company, which specialises in developing a generative AI writing assistant for businesses, secured investment from lead investor ICONIQ Growth, as well as Insight Partners, WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Aspect Ventures, Accenture, and Vanguard. The funding round has increased Writer’s valuation to $500 million, more than three times its previous valuation of $146 million in 2021.
Founded in 2020 by Lebanese-American entrepreneur May Habib and CTO Waseem Alshikh, the company’s platform helps businesses generate consistent and inclusive content for various purposes, including social media posts, job listings, product descriptions and emails. It achieves this by utilising large language models (LLMs), which form the foundation of generative AI technology. Writer emphasises that it does not train its models on customer data, prioritising security, data privacy, and compliance.
Earlier in 2023, Writer launched a free tool to detect whether text-based content was generated by AI software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While the accuracy of the tool was not disclosed at the time, the company has positioned itself as a full-stack generative AI platform catering to enterprise needs, delivering value in a fraction of the time it would typically take.
