Why 300 Companies Use This Startup’s AI To Slash Costs

It was 2016, and May Habib was in the most important meeting of her life. The Lebanese-Canadian entrepreneur had just moved to San Francisco from Dubai and was pitching Visa on her startup’s translation software. To have any chance at a Series A, she needed to land the deal—and fast.

But Visa’s executives, who wanted to roll out a digital payment product in 40-plus languages, had only ever worked with human translators and didn’t understand how her software would integrate with theirs. So Habib, now 40, stepped up to a whiteboard and mapped it out. And when they discovered a gap, she and her cofounder, Waseem Alshikh, went back to their house-cum-office in the Mission District and cranked out a GitHub integration to fill it.



Visa became Habib’s first major enterprise client with a $126,000 contract soon after, and she raised $5 million a few months later. “You’re not selling your software, you’re selling a different way of doing things,” she says. That’s the conceit behind Writer, Habib’s artificial intelligence company, which has evolved dramatically since those early days.

It now sells AI Studio, a Swiss Army knife suite of AI tools intended to expedite the corporate world’s many simple, but often tedious and expensive, menial tasks. For cosmetics giant L’Oréal, Writer drafted thousands of product description blurbs, for Uber hundreds of answers to frequently asked questions. Salesforce uses it to quickly gin up email and social media marketing campaigns.

Those are just three of the 300 companies that pay—sometimes millions—to use Writer’s customizable AI apps to automate time-consuming everyday work. The enthusiastic embrace of enterprise has helped Writer, one of the sizzling startups featured on Forbes’ annual AI 50 list (see page 82), raise some $320 million from top venture capitalists. Its November $200 million round valued the company at $1.

9 billion; Habib retains an estima­ted 15% stake worth $285 million. At a time when so many companies are trying to figure out exactly how AI can help grow their business—and whether the investment is worth it—Writer’s customers are using its tools to cut costs in a material way. An AI executive at a top health product retailer says their team uses Writer’s AI to advertise on TikTok, Amazon and Walmart, which has generated $5 million in value annually between cost savings and new sales opportunities—a number they expect to balloon to $25 million in the next two years.

Victoria’s Secret–owned lingerie brand AdoreMe used Writer’s AI to translate 2,900 product descriptions into Spanish as part of its expansion to Mexico, distilling a months-long process down to 10 days. “The ROI is screaming at you,” says Sandesh Patnam, mana­ging partner at private equity firm Premji Invest, who co-led Writer’s funding round last year. Such savings have spiked Writer’s net retention rate to a stunning 160%, indicating that customers end up expanding their contracts by 60% on average.

Habib says 20 customers started with contracts between $200,000 and $300,000, quickly found new ways to use Writer’s tools and are now spending about $1 million each. A pitch deck from last fall shows it brought in $9.3 million in revenue in 2023 and was forecasting $28 million in revenue for 2024.

Writer said the figures were inaccurate and declined to comment further, but shared that it currently has more than $50 million in signed contracts, which it projects will double to $100 million this year. Writer’s confidence stems from its newest product, “AI HQ,” which includes tools to build artificially intelligent agents that can perform a series of tasks that are typically part of the workflow of an actual job. A financial analyst, for instance, could create an agent that pulls data from earnings-call transcripts, analyzes it and emails a personalized version to their entire client list.

No coding is required; you just explain in plain English the sequence of steps you want the agent to carry out and click a button. At an annual cost that can reach into the millions, Writer also provides more than 70 pregenera­ted apps and agents that clients can use immediately. “People don’t have to do the work,” Habib says.

“They only have to build AI that does it for them.” Already, major customers like fintech Intuit ($16.3 billion in 2024 revenue) and homebuil­der Lennar (sales: $35.

4 billion) are trying out Writer’s agent tools. Lennar CTO Scott Spradley says his team’s Writer agents have so far written thousands of email responses to inquiries from potential buyers, scheduling appointments to view the company’s thousands of homes and providing information like their price or location. “It’s driving volume, it’s driving activity, it’s creating better leads,” he says.

It also heralds the beginning of a paradigm shift for businesses looking to shave labor costs. Why bother paying people to do what an AI agent can do equally well and faster? That’s the real opportunity for Writer and the rest of the $58 billion enterprise AI market. Habib is blunt about what this means for rank-and-file knowledge workers: “Ten percent of the headcount is going to be enough.

” With the enterprise AI software market poised nearly to double to $114 billion by 2027, competition is stiff. Deep-pocketed OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised a collective $42 billion, sell bare-bones models that businesses can then use to build tools. But they typi­cally require a team of developers to calibrate, deploy and update.

Writer’s tech is largely plug-and-play, with user-friendly drag-and-drop interfaces. It doesn’t require messing around with AI models or crafting the perfect prompt every time. “We make so much of the magic invisible for folks,” Habib says.

It has done that by home-brewing the models that power AI Studio and AI HQ. That’s important for security: Client data is retrieved from dedicated servers and isn’t used to train models, mitigating concerns about sensitive information leaking. Writer’s models address another core concern businesses have with AI: its occasional tendency to make things up.

Writer’s AIs pull data directly from customers’ documents, guaranteeing far fewer hallucinations, if less creativity. But who needs poetry when your AI is genera­ting market analysis? In a world in which OpenAI spent $100 million to train GPT-4, Writer is doing all this relatively cheaply. Its rival model cost just $700,000 to build.

That’s far less even than DeepSeek, the Chinese company that upended the AI world by building a model that competes with OpenAI’s at a fraction of the cost. “DeepSeek made efficiency cool, but Writer has been doing it for years,” says Rob Toews, a Writer board member and partner at Toronto-based VC shop Radical Ventures, which is an investor. Not everyone is sold.

Some industry experts are unsure whether Wri­ter’s smaller models can keep up with the giants. On popular leaderboards, which rank models based on how well they answer a host of questions, Writer trails AI juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose revenue is in the billions. OpenAI has 2 million paying users for ChatGPT Enterprise, and Anthropic reportedly projects it will grow to $34.

5 billion in revenue by 2027, two-thirds of which will come from enterprise users. “Writer’s great strength has been evangelizing what they’re doing. I think the challenge is making sure the technology can live up to that,” says one venture capitalist who has invested in other enterprise AI companies.

Writer trained its own models (named Palmyra after the ancient Syrian city) even though everyone advised them against it. “You don't need to play by the rules all the time," says CTO Waseem Alshik." Guerin Blask For Forbes Habib is confident it can.

Companies care more about real-world performance than benchmark horse races. And with a client roster that already includes blue-chip outfits like Accenture, Hilton, Spotify and Qualcomm, Writer’s investors are happy to continue betting on her. “She just can run through walls and make the impossible happen,” Toews says.

Even VCs who passed on the last round speak admiringly of her. “She’s just kind of a force of nature,” says one. Entrepreneurship runs in the family, says Habib, who grew up in a tiny village on the war-torn border of Lebanon and Syria.

Her father started his own tool-and-die shop, while her mother worked at a pita bakery. The eldest of eight siblings, Habib was managing the family checkbook by age 9. Her family fled the civil war to Canada in 1990, and Habib, the only one in her family who spoke English, graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in economics and a minor in Eastern languages.

While working as an investment banker in Dubai, she met Alshikh, 40, a Syrian technol­ogy executive who had taught himself to speak English so he could learn to code. Alshikh’s first company, which converted satellite photos into digital maps for cars, was taken over by the Syrian government because it thought he wasn’t “patriotic” enough, he says; in retaliation, he claims he hacked into the government’s servers to shut down the internet in the country. The duo launched the first iteration of Writer in 2015 as machine translation company Qordoba, before pivo­ting to build AI that could generate content in a company’s style and tone, relaunching as Writer in 2020.

Twitter became one of its first customers, using Writer’s system to pump out blog posts. (After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he stopped paying; Writer sued and eventually got 95% of what it was owed. X, as Twitter is now known, did not respond to a request for comment.

) Habib jokes that Writer has evolved into a different company every four to six months to stay relevant. “We are the Eras Tour of generative AI,” she says, nodding to Taylor Swift’s career-timeline concerts. “We extract the rate of change for companies that can’t get their heads around it on their own.

” It’s fitting, then, that the next stage of Writer’s business involves an entirely new approach to AI. Alshikh calls it “self-evolving.” His team is building models that learn from mistakes automatically, without needing a human to correct them.

“It’s like hiring smart people in your companies,” he says. “You expect them over time to know more and learn more.” For Habib, this means new possibilities, and she can’t wait to get in the room with her customers to sketch them out together.

“Even now, the team knows there has to be a whiteboard,” she says. “I can’t co-think or co-create with a customer without trying to imagine something that doesn’t exist.” Additional reporting by Richard Nieva.

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