Artificial Intelligence · Profile from AI Research Companion
Writer
The San Francisco enterprise generative-AI company (styled WRITER from 2025) founded by May Habib and Waseem Alshikh, who turned their earlier localisation start-up Qordoba into a writing assistant for corporate brand and style in 2020 and then, unusually for an application company, trained its own family of large language models (Palmyra) to sell a "full-stack" platform — models, retrieval, guardrails and, from 2025, an agent builder — to large companies such as Accenture, Intuit, Marriott, Uber and Vanguard (company). Writer raised $100m at ~$500m (September 2023) and $200m at $1.9bn (November 2024) from a cap table that included Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, Workday and Citi venture arms. Its distinctive bet is that owning the model lets it offer cheaper, more controllable enterprise AI than an application built on OpenAI or Anthropic; its risk is competing with those labs' far larger budgets while staying small. By late October 2026 it had not announced a priced round since November 2024.
At a glance
- Founded
- Qordoba founded 2015 by May Habib and Waseem Alshikh (localisation and content consistency); relaunched as Writer in 2020 (company, reported)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, with offices in New York, London and elsewhere (reported, verify)
- Ownership / structure
- Private, venture-backed; investors include Insight Partners, Balderton, Aspect Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, Accenture, Vanguard, B Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, IBM Ventures, Workday Ventures and Citi Ventures (company, reported)
- Leadership (2026)
- May Habib (co-founder and CEO); Waseem Alshikh (co-founder and CTO); Jevan Soo Lenox (first chief people officer, July 2025); Mina Alaghband (first chief customer officer, January 2026) (company)
- AI products
- Writer platform (writing assistant with style guides and terminology); Palmyra LLMs (from 2023; Palmyra-Med and Palmyra-Fin domain models; Palmyra X4, 2024; Palmyra X5 with ~1m-token context, April 2025); Knowledge Graph (graph-based retrieval); AI Studio / no-code app and agent builder; "AI HQ" agent platform (2025); agent skills and playbooks (March 2026); event-based triggers (April 2026)
- Scale
- "Hundreds" of enterprise customers (company, 2025); ~300 enterprise customers (Inc., reported, date unclear); ARR "more than tripled" in the 12 months before November 2024 (reported); dollar revenue not disclosed (a ~$47m figure circulates on aggregator sites — unverified)
- Capital raised
- Series A $21m led by Insight Partners (November 2021, reported); Series B $100m led by ICONIQ Growth at ~$500m (September 2023, reported); Series C $200m at $1.9bn co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth (12 November 2024, company); total ~$326m after Series C (TechCrunch); the ~$369m in some early-2026 profiles has no primary source and no new round was found to explain it — use ~$326m (re-checked Nov 2026)
- Key partnerships
- Amazon Bedrock (Palmyra X5 and X4, April 2025); Nvidia NIM (Palmyra domain models, 2024, reported, verify); strategic investors Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, Workday, Accenture
- Signature moves (incl. failures)
- The Qordoba-to-Writer relaunch (2020); the Insight-led Series A (2021); Palmyra and the full-stack bet (2023); the ICONIQ Series B (2023); the $1.9bn Series C with software-company investors (2024); Palmyra X5 on Amazon Bedrock (2025); AI HQ and the agent platform (2025–26); the funding gap and the frontier-lab squeeze (2026)
8 strategic moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2020
Founding from Qordoba
Founding / pivot
2021
Series A and the Enterprise Style Guide
Funding round / product focus
2023
Palmyra Models and the Full Stack Bet
Model release / strategic pivot
2023
Series B ICONIQ and the Enterprise Push
Funding round
2024
Series C and the Software Company Investors
Funding round
2025
AI HQ and the Agent Platform
Launch (series of product releases)
2025
Palmyra X5 and Amazon Bedrock
Model release / partnership
2026
Funding Gap and the Frontier Lab Squeeze
Competitive pressure (failure-risk case)