Photo by Mina Rad on Unsplash
AI Startup Writer Raises $200 Million, Reaches $1.9 Billion Valuation
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!
- Generative AI company Writer raised $200 million to expand its full-stack AI platform
- The company reached a $1.9 billion valuation and expects to generate $50 million in annual revenue by the end of the year
- Writer wants to expand and develop autonomous AI solutions
The generative AI startup Writer recently raised $200 million to expand its platform, reaching a $1.9 billion valuation.
According to Forbes , the round C series was led by Radical Ventures—an AI-focused firm—, private equity firm Premji Invest, and Iconiq Capital.
Writer, founded in 2020 by Waseem AlShikh and May Habib, started as a content creation company specializing in blogs, descriptions, and summaries, and evolved to include services like developing generative AI applications and workflows, analyzing documents for compliance, and optimizing processes to reduce costs.
“What we say now is that if you can write it, if you can describe it, you can build it,” said CEO and co-founder May Habib to Forbes. She embraces her company’s evolution and expects to reach $50 million in annual revenue by the end of this year.
According to TechCrunch , in 2023, the full-stack AI platform company built its own large language models (LLM) Palmyra, for text generation which can understand their client’s lingo with its architectural approach.
“At Writer, we’re not just creating AI models that can execute tasks, but developing advanced AI systems that deliver mission-critical enterprise work,” said Habib in the press release . “With this new funding, we’re laser-focused on delivering the next generation of autonomous AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and adaptable in highly complex, real-world enterprise scenarios.”
Writer has been working with large global businesses, including companies like Uber, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and N26 among its clients.
The startup is competing in the AI agent market, along with other startups like 11x.ai—which recently raised $50 million in a series B funding — and companies like Slack , and Microsoft .
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Search Engines Ecosia and Qwant Announce New Alliance To Compete Against Google And Bing
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!
- Search engines Ecosia and Qwant are partnering to create a European search index in a joint venture called European Search Perspective
- The companies want to gain independence from Google and Bing and take advantage of the Digital Markets Act
- They plan to launch the new search index during the first quarter of next year in France
Berlin-based search engine Ecosia and French privacy-focused search engine Qwant announced a new partnership to develop a new European search index.
According to TechCrunch , the companies expect to bring innovation with the help of AI and Large Language Models (LLM) to diminish their dependence on American tech companies like Alphabet and Microsoft and their respective search engines Google and Bing. Ecosia and Qwant currently rely on Bing and Google for APIs and results for their products.
“With the emergence of AI tools there is a different demand now for a search index,” said Christian Kroll, Ecosia CEO, to TechCrunch. “The two providers, Bing and Google, are basically getting more reluctant to make their index accessible. And of course, as a search engine, we need an index. So that’s partially why we want to make sure we have access.
According to CNBC , the not-for-profit search engine Ecosia and Qwant agreed on a “privacy-first” policy for the new joint venture called the European Search Perspective (EUSP) in which both share a 50-50 ownership.
The new project is expected to be released during the first quarter of next year in France, where Qwant is headquartered. The companies are taking advantage of the Digital Markets Act which aims to regulate gatekeepers and allow small to mid-size European companies to compete more fairly.
“We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision — for instance, Microsoft’s decision to increase costs to access their search API — could jeopardize our business,” said Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant, to CNBC, “It is nothing against the U.S. or U.S. companies. It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies.” Abecassis will also be the CEO of European Search Perspective.
The search engine market evolving as users are relying more on different ways to access information, from social media to chatbots. OpenAI recently launched its AI-powered search engine , and Perplexity has been working on a new advertising system for its AI search platform.
