Inside Writer

– 7 min read

The future of enterprise work

Building an autonomous AI platform for the enterprise

May Habib

May Habib   |  November 12, 2024

The future of enterprise work: Building an autonomous AI platform for the enterprise

Four years ago, Waseem and I took a bet on transformers — the core innovation behind modern large language models (LLMs). Long before they first made headlines, we saw the transformer’s potential to become the connective tissue of the enterprise and completely rewire how we work.

So we built Palmyra — the first Writer LLM. Since then, we’ve relentlessly pushed the boundaries of what LLMs could do by furiously productizing every capability increase of the transformer for the enterprise.

We like to say that the story of Writer is the story of the transformer. And we’re here because we never let up.

But the story of Writer is also the story of partnership.

It’s the story of a team fiercely dedicated to the wild success of our customers. A team that has delivered a comprehensive suite of tools that solve real-world challenges for the greatest companies on the planet.

A sample of Writer's 250+ enterprise customers

From graph-based RAG to AI guardrails, app builders, and advanced observability and reporting, we’ve built the essential infrastructure for enterprise generative AI. These capabilities, powered by our state-of-the-art Palmyra LLMs, have become mission-critical for our customers, transforming how they operate and innovate.

This is what we call full-stack generative AI, and this architecture is transforming work in the enterprise.

With our platform, bankers and financial advisors have access to expert assistants in a click of a button; product teams can mine customer insights and build better products faster; medical clinicians can make more informed decisions — even when the stakes are high.

Writer empowers the people behind the work to radically change how they do their jobs. And the business results are off the charts.

We’ve succeeded by partnering closely with our customers, but also moving at a breakneck speed. In the past year, we’ve grown our team to over 250 employees, launched dozens of new features and products, and quickly became known as the leading platform for delivering ROI with AI. But that’s just the beginning.

Over the coming years, our AI platform will be capable of learning, reasoning, and adapting across any task or work domain, not just those pre-programmed or trained into it. Freeing people to focus on the difficult, creative work that only humans can do. But this type of intelligence will only happen when AI can traverse complex workflows, systems, and data to ultimately help deliver outcomes.

That brings us to today. At Writer, we’re not waiting for an autonomous AI platform of the future. We’re building it. And I’m excited to share that we’ve just closed our Series C, raising $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation, to help us get there.

Series C - Fueling the future of Enterprise AI with $200M at $1.9B

With this latest round we’re welcoming new investors that share our vision of the future — Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, B Capital, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures. We’re thrilled to also have the continued investment and support of our existing investors ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, Balderton, Accenture, and Vanguard.

This funding will cement our leadership in the enterprise generative AI category — allowing us to expand our team, build more critical workflows for our customers, and bring powerful new agentic and workflow capabilities to our full-stack AI platform.

To our customers, who have let us be your partner on your most mission-critical generative AI initiatives, thank you: we live and breathe your success.

To everyone at Writer: I am humbled every day by your talent, dedication, and heart, and I am honored to get to be your leader. This milestone is a validation of our common vision for work that is more creative, more joyful, more interesting — everywhere in the enterprise.

Architecture matters: Enterprise AI, the Writer way 

The Writer team has spent tens of thousands of hours learning about our customers’ mission-critical workflows — and countless more building AI apps to help automate them.

That’s Writer. We’re the full-stack enterprise AI platform that the CXOs of the world’s largest companies trust to help build AI for their toughest business challenges.

Writer platform explained

At the core of the Writer platform is a powerful reasoning engine. It includes state-of-the-art models built from the ground up for the enterprise — models, by the way, that are top-ranked on HELM, exceptional at tool calling, and are the best finance and healthcare models on the market — and includes proprietary graph-based RAG for mapping and memorizing your company data.

Our reasoning engine powers AI apps that have structured inputs and outputs, allowing you to fit Writer seamlessly into an existing workstream. It also powers agents that can work with other systems, think through complex tasks, and analyze your company data. 

As AI becomes more autonomous, our jobs will involve monitoring and shepherding these systems. That’s why our platform includes a control plane with powerful guardrails that can centrally control all your AI apps. These include custom AI rules, advanced admin controls, and more.

The magic of the Writer platform is that we’ve made all of this tech available to builders. We offer easy-to-use APIs and SDKs for enterprise developers. But not everyone knows how to code, so it’s also available through our out-of-the-box apps, our no-code app builder, or bespoke apps designed and built for you by Writer.

Powering the enterprise of tomorrow

In the coming year, you’ll see Writer double down on end-to-end automation around our customers’ mission-critical workflows including:

  1. Better tool use and workflows: If AI is going to become the connective tissue of the enterprise it needs to connect to everything. To do this we’re building powerful workflow tools that allow businesses to codify their business logic, and create AI blueprints of their mission-critical workflows.
  2. More observability and control: You’ll also see us ship better tools for monitoring AI across your business, evaluating its impact, and controlling what it can and can’t do.
  3. Improved reasoning: We’re going to build deeper, more efficient, models with larger context windows that can reason through a complex series of actions. This includes more domain-specific models that, just like our Healthcare and Finance models, will be top-ranked, highly efficient, and available directly from the Writer platform.

Our core business and the solutions we sell will also continue to improve. We’ll ship more off-the-shelf workflows for different departments. And as we continue to build mission-critical workflows for our customers, we’ll further customize these solutions for our customers’ industries.

And lastly, we’re going to meaningfully increase the size of our team — deepening our expertise in industries, and expanding our bench with the world’s most talented engineers, product leaders, marketing gurus, and sales experts. We’ve got 100s of roles open.

A future built together, now

At Writer, we’re not just imagining a world where AI transforms the enterprise — we’re building it, step by step, in close collaboration with our customers. Every breakthrough we achieve, every challenge we solve, brings us closer to a future where businesses operate with unprecedented intelligence, creativity, and speed.

The secret to our success has always been our relentless focus on helping our customers navigate this massive wave of innovation and deliver outcomes. ‌Writer is committed to continuing to be the best partner possible for enterprises to thrive in the age of AI.

The future of AI is not something we’re waiting for. It’s here, and we’re building it. Right now.