Main Highlights:
- Writer is an artificial intelligence-powered writing assistance for marketing teams to augment their customer outreach.
- The San Francisco, California, based tech firm, formerly known as Qordoba was founded in 2015 by Habib and Waseem.
- The cash will be utilized to expand Writer’s client acquisition techniques and workforce, according to CEO May Habib.
Writer, which advertises itself as artificial intelligence-assisted writing assistance for marketing teams, revealed today that it had secured $21 million. (The Writer’s total is currently $25 million.) Insight Partners headed the Series A financing with participation from Gradient Ventures. According to Writer CEO May Habib, the funds would be used for client acquisition strategies and headcount growth.
Writer’s rise results from marketers’ increasing use of artificial intelligence to augment their customer outreach. According to McKinsey, 80 percent of high-performing organizations have implemented AI in marketing and sales for functions such as pricing, probability of purchase prediction, and customer service analytics.
According to Habib, their vision is to make excellent writing accessible to everyone. Because most teams lack the editorial resources necessary to ensure strong writing and consistent messaging across large volumes of content, they provide a seamless way for everyone at a company to write well, write quickly, and be on-brand.
Writer provides suggestions enabled by artificial intelligence
Based in San Francisco, California, Habib and Waseem Alshikh established Writer, formerly Qordoba, in 2015. Alshikh previously served as CEO of iMena, a holding company interested in journalism, retail, and classified ads across the Middle East and North Africa. Habib formerly held the position of vice president at one of the world’s leading sovereign wealth funds, where she was the founding member of the technology investment team.
The two founded Writer out of a shared ambition to create software that assists businesses in writing more concise, consistent marketing content. Through artificial intelligence, Writer’s platform generates guidelines that help firms align content across communications, marketing, product, and human resources documents.
On the AI front, the Writer uses an engine that assesses factors such as plagiarism, sentence difficulty, tone, paragraph length, spelling and grammar, formality, and active voice usage, among others. Additionally, the platform enables businesses to construct, amend, and share a “single source of truth” for brand phrases. For instance, teams can provide usage examples with accompanying descriptions and instructions and organize concepts into a taxonomy across programs such as Chrome, Microsoft Word, and Figma by utilizing tags, filters, statuses, and change history.
According to Writer’s website, they’ve made it simple for people’s teams to reuse their approved work, from single lines to page-long templates. He stated that they should preserve formatting, lists, and links, incorporate variable placeholders for dynamic content, and organize their snippets using categories, filters, and statuses to make them easily discoverable.
With Writer’s snippet shortcuts feature, users may quickly access a snippet from anywhere they write or search for information in-line. Additionally, team leaders can use Writer’s administrative functions to establish editorial style norms for punctuation and capitalization while also enforcing the organization’s reading grade level requirements.
The Writer includes a style guide management feature that provides templates and samples and links to rules, term banks, and snippet libraries. Customizable fonts, colors, and branding can be applied to style guide pages made available online for public use.
Other competitors
Enterprises are increasing their investments in tools like Writer that leverage natural language processing (NLP), an area of linguistics and artificial intelligence concerned with how algorithms evaluate massive amounts of text. According to a poll conducted by John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of technology leaders reported that their NLP expenditures increased by at least 10% from 2020 levels, while a third — 33% — claimed that their spending increased by more than 30%.
Grammarly, which offers similar AI-powered writing assistance for various use cases, is a competitor to Writer. However, Writer claims that Grammarly lacks the same style guide and “voice alignment” skills and a gender-neutral pronoun and “simple language” conversion capabilities.
As customers, the Writer lists Pinterest, Bill.com, Accenture, Deloitte, Twitter, and Intuit. Annual recurring revenue more than tripled this year as the startup’s customer base grew to 150 businesses.
