Enterprise AI platform Writer secured $200M in Series C funding at a $1.9B valuation
Writer, an AI company that developed the Palmyra language model series, has secured $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform and hail the next generation of AI applications and agents for use cases.
Writer is a company that has evolved from an AI-powered content creation platform specializing in developing proprietary LLMs that let customers write everything from emails and ads to documents and summaries adhering to the organization's editorial guidelines to a "full-stack generative AI platform for the enterprise". The company has seen remarkable success and boasts an impressive customer roster, including Mars, Salesforce, Accenture, Uber, and L'Oreal.
The company's proprietary models, Palmyra, have gained notoriety for several reasons. Writer CEO May Habib claims that, due to their unique architecture, its models do not hallucinate. This is undoubtedly a bold claim, and Habib at least implicitly qualified it by highlighting that when Palmyra does hallucinate, it is easily detected by the fact that Writer will highlight the portion of unsourced text.
Writer's most recent release, Palmyra X 004, was trained mainly on synthetic data, and according to the reports, cost the company about $700,000 to develop (the cost for a similarly-sized OpenAI model is estimated at $4.6 million). Moreover, Palmyra X 004 currently ranks tenth in the Stanford HELM Lite leaderboard and allegedly surpasses all models in Berkeley’s Tool Calling Leaderboard (the model is not officially ranked).
Writer recently announced it raised $200 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and existing investor ICONIQ Growth at a $1.9 billion valuation. Writer's Series C funding round counted on support from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures, in addition to existing investors Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners, and Vanguard. The company has stated that it will use the funding to accelerate the delivery of the next generation of AI-powered applications and agents for "time-intensive workflows in healthcare, retail, and financial services."
