WRITER raises $100 million in Series B to deliver on generative AI for enterprises

May Habib  |  September 18, 2023

I’m excited to announce that WRITER has raised $100 million in Series B funding! We’re thrilled to have ICONIQ Growth lead this round, with participation from Insight Partners, who led our Series A, along with WndrCo and Balderton Capital, and Aspect Ventures, who led our seed round. We’re grateful to have WRITER customers Accenture and Vanguard participate in this round, demonstrating their support in our team’s approach to building the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises.

In the past two years we’ve grown our revenue 10x and achieved over 150% net revenue retention. While we’re pleased with these achievements, we couldn’t have done it without our hundreds of enterprise customers, who partnered with us to build generative AI into their most impactful business processes.

Summarized by WRITER

• WRITER raised $100 million in Series B funding, led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from Insight Partners, WndrCo, Balderton Capital, and Aspect Ventures, and WRITER customers Accenture and Vanguard
• WRITER is the only full-stack generative AI platform with the quality and security required in the enterprise
• The WRITER platform consists of three key components: Palmyra (WRITER-built LLMs), Knowledge Graph, and AI guardrails
• WRITER offers prebuilt apps, composable UI options, chatbots, integrations, and APIs
• Plans for the future include developing industry-specific LLMs, AI agents, enterprise multi-modality LLMs, and expanding presence internationally

Our path to building the full-stack generative AI platform

WRITER CTO and co-founder Waseem AlShikh and I have been working on complex language problems for close to ten years. We first met in 2013 to start our first company together — a software platform that localizes content dynamically. We joined forces again in 2020 to start WRITER, our second company, together. We brought with us a wealth of experience working with enterprise customers, building transformer models, and using natural language processing technology. And over the last three years, we’ve come so very far.

Unlike other companies that focus solely on foundation models or out-of-the-box apps that serve a narrow set of use cases, WRITER is the only full-stack generative AI platform with the quality and security required in the enterprise — delivering value in a fraction of time it’d otherwise take.

Our vision for generative AI for the enterprise involves three key components working together in a single, secure, and hostable solution:

• Palmyra, our family of WRITER-built LLMs, is transparent and reliable, faster and more cost-effective than larger models, and fine-tuned for specific industries such as healthcare. It’s achieved top scores on key benchmarks like Stanford HELM and PubMedQA.
• Knowledge Graph securely integrates with your data to deliver high-quality outputs and insights based on your most important sources.
• AI guardrails make sure your work is compliant, accurate, inclusive, and on-brand, whether it’s created by your people or by AI.

On top of those components, we offer a flexible application layer of chatbots, prebuilt apps, and composable UI options to serve use cases across every function. And our ecosystem of integrations and APIs puts WRITER in all the places your people work.

Given our focus on the enterprise, we’ve taken security, data privacy, and compliance seriously from day one. Our platform does not use your data for model training and adheres to SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI. We offer flexible deployment options, including multi-tenant and single-tenant deployment in AWS and GCP.

“WRITER’s full-stack platform enables Vanguard to combine the expertise, creativity, and knowledge of our teams with the latest advancements in generative AI technology, boosting productivity.”

Nitin Tandon

Chief Information Officer, Vanguard

Our customers are our north star

While we may have a vision for a full-stack generative AI platform, delivering on that vision is impossible without the deep partnerships with our customers. We’re beyond grateful to them for giving us the opportunity to understand their business challenges, to design creative solutions, and to build implementations that scale.

In collaboration with our customers, we’ve uncovered three categories of enterprise use cases:

• Create: produce consistent, custom outputs
• Analyze: build chatbots that connect to your data
• Govern: enforce your AI guardrails

Here are just a few examples of how customers create, analyze, and govern with WRITER to achieve significant business impact:

• 6sense increased their writing output by 50% and achieves 100% brand compliance on written content.
• Commvault uses WRITER to analyze and synthesize dozens of prospect and customer interviews in seconds.
• Top healthcare companies use WRITER to generate case summaries, analyze medical records, and aid healthcare professionals in decision making on care and coverage.
• eDiscovery platforms develop AI chatbots with WRITER-built LLMs to quickly answer questions across millions of legal documents.

We’re thrilled to see our customers run faster across every function with generative AI. “WRITER’s full-stack platform enables Vanguard to combine the expertise, creativity, and knowledge of our teams with the latest advancements in generative AI technology, boosting productivity,” said Nitin Tandon, CIO of Vanguard.

“We believe that generative AI usage within enterprises is hitting an inflection point, and WRITER stands out to us as a leader in providing a full stack and secure platform to deliver on AI’s incredible promise.”

Doug Pepper

General Partner, ICONIQ Growth

What’s next for WRITER

In this challenging funding environment, we’re grateful to work with an incredible group of investors who value our focus on generative AI for enterprises. “WRITER’s ability to apply the power of generative AI to many different departments within the enterprise—from marketing to product, human resources, and more—has proven to be a game changer for C-suite leaders,” said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Growth. “We believe that generative AI usage within enterprises is hitting an inflection point, and WRITER stands out to us as a leader in providing a full stack and secure platform to deliver on AI’s incredible promise.”

In a study of over 50 enterprise customers, WRITER was found to return an average of 7.5 hours of productivity per employee per week, resulting in millions of dollars of ROI for enterprises. With this new round of funding, we’re excited to deliver even more value to our customers. Here’s what we have planned:

• Develop AI agents, or automated workflows powered by AI
• Develop enterprise multi-modality LLMs
• Deliver more industry-focused models (earlier this year, we launched Palmyra Med, our top-scoring LLM for the healthcare industry, and are working on more, such as ones for financial services and retail)
• Expand our presence internationally to better serve non-US customers

We’re thankful to all of our customers and partners for their trust and support over the last few years, and we look forward to what’s next!