While many companies have jumped on the GenAI bandwagon by tailoring existing software to capitalize on the surge in customer interest, others have been there from the start, building GenAI as a foundational technology in their tech offering.
Writer is one of the latter companies. Writer offers what it calls “full-stack” GenAI that provides the underpinnings to build AI apps while also offering out-of-the-box applications tailored to specific functions and industries.
Company Background
Writer was founded in 2020 by May Habib, the company’s CEO, and Waseem AlShikh, Writer’s CTO. Both have worked in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) for over a decade. Before Writer, they co-founded the machine translation and localization software company Qordoba in 2013.
Seven years after Qordoba’s launch, the pair embarked on a new mission: to develop a platform tailored for large enterprises to develop custom AI-powered applications.
Initially, Writer began as an AI writing assistant for marketers. Since then, the scope has broadened to address general-purpose use cases in multiple parts of a business as a full-stack GenAI platform.
Today, Writer has offices in San Fransisco, London, and New York, and upwards of 200 employees. The business is experiencing rapid growth, with a 200% year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue. The company’s 250-strong customer list features household names including: Accenture, Goldman Sachs, Nvidia, Prudential, Vanguard, and United Healthcare.
To date, Writer has raised $126 million from investors including well-known names such as Accenture, Google, and Vanguard.
Tech Innovation
Writer’s approach differs substantially from the personal co-pilot and consumer AI-focused products. Instead, Writer delivers a platform for enterprise customers that enables them to build and deploy custom AI applications and workflows including AI digital assistants, text generation and summarization apps, and data analysis tools at a rapid pace.
Countering what it describes as the DIY approach, Writer’s full-stack technology offering includes prebuilt applications ready to deploy off the shelf and tools for custom app building and deployment that sit on top of Writer’s platform-as-a-service. The capabilities provided by the platform include advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), security and governance, AI guardrails, and its suite of proprietary Palmyra LLMs.
Writer’s Palmyra LLMs regularly match or exceed the capabilities of many well-known LLMs such as GPT-4 and Gemini-1.0 in functions such as financial evaluations of real-world use cases. They are trained on 1 trillion tokens dedicated to business content and are domain-focused in industries including finance and healthcare.
With its Knowledge Graph, Writer provides a fine-tuned RAG approach that increases the accuracy of responses by building semantic relationships between structured and unstructured data. Writer’s RAG capabilities are both highly accurate and integrated into the platform.
Writer enables no-code app development, supercharging the breadth and speed of GenAI deployment, and provides a suite of APIs for flexible integration of applications and data. Writer Framework, an open-source development tool built on Python, provides visual editing capabilities.
Writer has a strong focus on the enterprise, emphasizing governance, trust, and security. It undergoes third-party testing and benchmarking to maintain accuracy, utilizing techniques including model auditing and output flagging to ensure safe outputs.
The company does not retain any customer data for training its models and employs encryption and multi-factor authentication for all major SSO providers to enhance security. Additionally, it simplifies compliance for customers by adhering to a wide range of global privacy laws and security standards.
Writer added to its AI innovations this week when it introduced the Frontier Large Action Model (LAM) Palmyra X 004, which enables AI apps to perform intelligent actions such as pulling data from a CRM system, updating financial records, writing and deploying code, and more. The company says that support for such actions is a key step toward autonomous AI while advancing its strategy for AI agents.
Strategic Partnerships
In addition to direct sales, Writer is building out its ecosystem of partners. Currently, a high percentage of the company’s pipeline is being contributed through its core partners, considering its current growth trajectory. Some of Writer’s key partners include Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG.
A company official highlighted Accenture as one example of a partnership that gives Writer a major boost. “Accenture is embracing Writer in multiple service practice areas, working with our data and AI group, marketing transformation group, sales transformation group, and others,” says Kevin Kimes, Director of Analyst Relations and Market Intelligence at Writer. “In other words, not being pigeonholed into any one practice area, but working with multiple groups to build businesses on Writer.”
The company also has strong relationships with Microsoft, AWS, and Google: it partners with all three of those hyperscalers and is available on the AWS and Google marketplaces.
Customer Success
One particularly significant customer success is Uber. In 2023, the ride-hailing giant company saw the growth of GenAI and wanted to implement the technology to boost the efficiency of its support teams and optimize customer experience.
With over five million knowledge assets across the company, Uber was aware that this decentralization could prove problematic when it came to implementing GenAI. The company needed GenAI software to prepare its knowledge ecosystem for machine and human consumption.
“We selected Writer because it had the fastest speed-to-market and robust capabilities, in addition to being able to scale with us as we grow,” said Hadley Ferguson, Director of Global Community Operations at Uber. “Writer is our source of truth to make sure that our teams are adhering to the legal and cultural differences for specific countries. It’s so powerful because it enables us to do this all with the touch of a button.”
Analyst’s Take
Cloud Wars analyst Toni Witt, an AI company founder, cited a couple key differentiators for Writer. “First, the platform is built to be ‘opinionated’, it guides enterprise users on what they should and shouldn’t do. It goes beyond providing just the raw tools, instead offering an end-to-end experience for launching GenAI use cases like generating reports, analyzing transcripts, and beyond,” Witt says. “This focus on the customer experience is unmatched by most other model providers, especially at the enterprise level where custom models, RAG, guardrails, and customization may be needed.”
Witt predicts that the Writer platform will help customers move beyond the DIY approach to GenAI. He also noted that the company’s customer successes are reinforced by the fact that large enterprises are redefining multiple areas of their business with Writer. “I often tell people who have barely tried ChatGPT that once you start using it, you’ll automatically find more areas in your life where it can help. The same applies at the enterprise level,” Witt adds.
Closing Thoughts
While many enterprises have embarked on GenAI projects with the ambition to build the technologies from scratch with their own AI engineering teams, this model isn’t always sustainable. Especially when you consider the volume of GenAI applications that can support the growth of a business.
Writer meets this issue head-on by providing a platform that takes away the complexity of model development, RAG development, and AI governance. Instead, Writer allows the enterprise to focus on the application layer.
As well as developing a suite of tools that support enterprise-grade GenAI app development proactively, the company’s approach to AI security and compliance is another critical feature. AI governance is only set to become more complicated as jurisdictions gradually introduce local and regional laws to ensure its safety. In light of this, Writer’s built-in compliance features are a major benefit.
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