A San Francisco-based startup developing a generative AI writing assistant for businesses has raised $100 million in a megaround that more than tripled its valuation.
Aptly named Writer, the company raised the Series B from lead investor ICONIQ Growth, as well as Insight Partners, WndrCo, Balderton Capital, Aspect Ventures, Accenture and Vanguard, it said in a blog post.
Bloomberg News first reported the news.
“So much of every technology evolution and revolution at work has made us work harder and longer hours, from email to social media to always-on communication platforms like Slack,” co-founder and CEO May Habib told Bloomberg News. “I think generative AI is actually able to reduce much more of the cognitive manual labor that opens up a much more creative day.”
Habib co-founded Writer with CTO Waseem Alshikh in 2020, and the new capital brings the company's total funding to $126 million.
Writer's valuation also increased more than three-fold to $500 million, Bloomberg News reported. It was valued at $146 million in 2021, according to PitchBook.
The company helps businesses automatically generate consistent and inclusive content for a variety of purposes including social media posts, job listings, product descriptions and emails.
It does so by utilizing large language models, commonly referred to as LLMs, which underpin generative AI technology, but the company says it doesn't train its models on customer data.
"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," Habib wrote in a blog post published on Monday. "We’ve taken security, data privacy, and compliance seriously from day one. Our platform never uses your data for model training."
In January, Writer launched a free tool which it says can detect whether text-based content was generative by AI software like OpenAI's ChatGPT, but the company wouldn't say how accurate the tool was at the time.
