Enterprise Generative AI Startup Writer Raises $100M

Corporate generative AI assistant startup Writerhas raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Iconiq Growth.  Writer’s platform offers businesses text-generating models and tools for marketing, product development, customer support, and other tasks. The new funding will go toward improving its proprietary models and adding multimodal functions.

Writer AI

Writer employs natural language processing models built in-house and linked to the knowledge graphs of its clients to design chatbots and other conversational interfaces for its AI assistants. The company has grown from AI-assisted editing and brand adherence to a wide-ranging toolkit for written content, which the company describes as being a “full-stack” generative AI platform for businesses. The company began focusing on generative AI last year when it introduced a text generator called CoWrite employing OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model. CoWrite first worked as an aide for drafting marketing, promotional, and related content but has been subsumed into the greater Writer platform.

As do several of Writer’s competitors, Writer lets customers connect its models to business data sources to improve their ability to research, fact-check and answer questions. In addition, Writer allows companies to enforce regulatory, legal and brand rules across the models on its platform.

“Our foundation models are best-in-class, and they’re auditable, inspectable, and hostable — but it’s not just about the models,” Writer CEO May Habib said. “Any CIO who’s tried to build an internal generative AI application will tell you that the last mile of quality is the hardest. And we help them nail that, at scale, dozens and dozens of times as they build AI applications and assistants that enable their entire organization. And our customer’s desire to invest in the company is a true testament to the value we’re providing.”

The new funding is a massive jump from Writer’s $21 million funding round in late 2021, bringing its total investment to $126 million. The company boasts 150% revenue retention year-over-year. Writer points to its ability to fine-tune models on non-copyrighted business writing and more efficient, smaller models as part of its advantage in pitching clients. The startup faces a mushrooming array of potential rivals that either launched as enterprise generative AI assistants or expanded in that direction lately. The list includes Anthropic’s Claude the revamped WordTune platform from AI21, Jasper’s marketing campaign creator, and even Cohere and its new Coral chatbot. OpenAI recently unveiled its own ChatGPT Enterprise tool as well.

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