Writer is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform developed specifically for enterprise use. Founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and operates additional offices in cities such as New York, London, Chicago, and Austin. Writer enables businesses to automate tasks, digitize workflows, and make data-driven decisions through large language models (LLMs).
Establishment
From its inception, Writer’s primary objective has been to ensure the secure, efficient, and customizable use of generative AI in enterprise environments. The founders’ prior work on machine translation projects laid the foundation for Writer’s multilingual and industry-specific model development approach. The company created its proprietary LLM family, named Palmyra, which is adapted to the needs of various sectors. Writer adheres to a zero-data retention policy and does not use customer data for model training.
Funding and Growth
In November 2024, Writer raised $200 million in a Series C funding round led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, increasing its valuation to $1.9 billion. Other participants included Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, IBM Ventures, Citi Ventures, Insight Partners, and Workday Ventures. To date, the company has raised over $325 million in total funding.
AI HQ Platform and Autonomous Agents
As of 2025, Writer’s core technological solution is its AI HQ platform, which allows enterprises to build, deploy, and manage their own AI agents. The platform consists of three main components: Agent Builder (for custom agent development), Writer Home (a library of ready-to-use agents), and monitoring/governance tools. These agents can carry out multi-step tasks autonomously, including process mapping, decision-making, document generation, and software integration.
Technical Infrastructure
Writer’s Palmyra family includes several LLMs designed for enterprise workflows:
- Palmyra X4 for general-purpose use
- Palmyra X5 optimized for long-context analysis
- Palmyra Creative for content generation
- Palmyra Fin for financial applications
- Palmyra Med for medical use
These models support over 30 languages and feature advanced reasoning, tool invocation, and real-time information retrieval capabilities. Palmyra models are integrated with Writer’s Knowledge Graph infrastructure, which enables more contextual and accurate responses beyond traditional vector-based approaches, offering relational data retrieval and cost-effective scalability.
Use Cases
Writer delivers customized generative AI solutions across sectors such as finance, retail, healthcare, law, human resources, and technology. Its platform supports a range of applications, including accelerating recruitment processes, automating compliance reviews, localizing product descriptions, enhancing customer support systems, and streamlining document analysis.
The platform’s architecture is customizable for both technical teams and business units. Enterprises can build agents from scratch or integrate over 100 pre-configured agents into their systems. A general-purpose agent named Ask Writer provides internal knowledge access through natural language queries.
Security, Compliance, and Privacy
Writer complies with major data protection and security standards such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and SOC 2 Type II. Its security infrastructure includes principles such as zero training on customer data, single-tenant deployment, role-based access control, and explainability.
Research and Development
Writer conducts research through its dedicated R&D unit, focusing on areas like FailSafeQA, self-evolving models, and Graph RAG. Self-evolving models aim to improve performance based on past errors without requiring retraining. Pilot deployments of these systems are expected by the end of 2025.
Corporate Structure and Partnerships
May Habib serves as CEO, and Waseem AlShikh as CTO. To support enterprise adoption, Writer operates programs for solution partners, technology integrators, and referral partners. The company also runs Writer Academy, which provides tools and content to train internal users in AI development.
Writer differentiates itself in the enterprise generative AI space through vertical specialization, a secure application framework, and an integrated agent development architecture. Its platform enables collaborative work between technical and non-technical teams within a unified environment, advancing enterprise-level AI transformation.
Future Outlook
Writer’s strategic roadmap focuses on three main pillars: scaling autonomous AI agents, developing industry-specific LLMs, and integrating secure AI systems with internal enterprise data. The company envisions a future where a substantial portion of business processes can operate autonomously without human oversight.
As AI HQ evolves, Writer agents are expected to shift from executing isolated tasks to managing end-to-end complex workflows. Future updates are anticipated to introduce more adaptable tools and personalized agent behaviors. The company also plans to launch pilot versions of its self-evolving models in 2025.
Writer aims to strengthen its Palmyra model family with new iterations (e.g., Palmyra X5 and Palmyra Creative) to deliver more effective solutions in highly regulated domains such as healthcare, finance, and law. Enhancements will prioritize explainability, source attribution, and reduced hallucination rates.
At the organizational level, data privacy and AI governance remain central to Writer’s strategic direction. The platform is continuously updated to comply with regulations such as the EU AI Act and similar frameworks. Its distributed and auditable AI infrastructure is designed to support secure integration in regulated industries.
On the educational front, the company continues its strategy to empower users as “AI builders” through Writer Academy, positioning AI not merely as a tool but as a key driver of workforce transformation. Writer actively encourages the integration of institutional knowledge into generative AI workflows.
Through these strategic initiatives, Writer aims to make the use of generative AI in the business world more widespread, sustainable, and compliant with regulatory standards in the coming years.
