Earlier this month, Writer co-founder and CEO May Habib took the stage at the HumanX conference in San Francisco to discuss with Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas why so many companies’ A.I. strategies are failing. In a landscape where 95 percent of enterprise generative A.I. pilots fail to deliver returns, Writer has carved out a role helping Fortune 500 companies build A.I. agents and automated workflows that integrate with existing systems. Its offerings include Writer Agent, a platform for executing multi-step tasks, and Palmyra, a proprietary family of large language models built for enterprise use. The San Francisco-based startup last raised $200 million in November 2024 at a $1.9 billion valuation. If a gold rush rewards shovel sellers, the A.I. race rewards practical implementation.
Habib and her co-founder and CTO, Waseem Alshikh, met in Dubai in 2011 after she reached out on Twitter about his work in statistical machine translation. The connection quickly turned into a partnership, leading to the launch of Qordoba, a startup focused on A.I.-powered content localization. In 2020, they co-founded Writer.
“Honestly, I think it is up there with one of the best five things, days, moments, lucky breaks that I’ve ever had, is meeting my co-founder and deciding to do this with him,” Habib told Observer.
Habib was born in a village on the Lebanon-Syria border during the Lebanese Civil War. Her family fled to Canada in 1990. As the eldest of eight children and the only English speaker, she often served as an interpreter, a role that later shaped her interest in language technology. She graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in economics and a minor in Eastern languages, eventually channeling those experiences into work in natural language processing and machine learning, including the founding of Qordoba.
At Writer, the co-founders maintain a complementary dynamic: Habib represents the voice of the customer, while Alshikh represents the technology. The company initially positioned itself as an “A.I. writing assistant for professional users,” helping organizations scale communication. In early 2025, it pivoted toward A.I. agents following advances in model reasoning.
“Our focus has always been on multi-step, real-world workflows, and we now have models that can execute these workflows with minimal errors, minimal human intervention, and because of the way we have harnessed our product, with the audibility, transparency, [and] scalability that the enterprise needs,” Habib said.
Writer declined to share revenue figures but said it has more than 300 enterprise customers deploying over 15,000 agents. Clients include Ally Financial, AstraZeneca, Cigna, Clorox, Comcast, Franklin Templeton, Keurig Dr Pepper, Lennar, Marriott, Mars, Uber and Vanguard.
One of its most notable customers is Salesforce, where more than 3,000 employees use Writer to query and generate content from internal data. The company has also trained 50 internal “champions” to build custom agents and workflows using no-code tools. Airbnb is another client, using Writer to generate content for 37,000 web pages during its Experiences rollout.
While many A.I. startups emerged after ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, Writer predates the boom and viewed it as competition.
“You know, it sharpened our pencils. It sharpened our delivery. So much of our speed, and our product velocity, we owe to that immense competition coming onto the scene 100 percent,” Habib said.
“Writer was founded before the ChatGPT moment changed the market. They focused entirely on the enterprise from the start,” Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told Observer. “What protected them was what they already built: regulatory compliance, deep customization, and a proprietary model family that gives customers full control over their data and outputs.”
Asked why many companies struggle to deploy A.I., Habib pointed to a focus on incremental improvements instead of structural change.
“I think taking 54 handoffs in a process and making it 27, it’s not just uninspiring, it simply doesn’t work. The change management is torture,” she said. “You need a radical new model for how work gets done… to support these end-to-end workflow transformations.”
Companies clinging to legacy processes risk falling behind. As an A.I.-first company, Writer emphasizes speed and decisiveness. “We probably do things in a day that take other companies a month. We have to be decisive, because if we’re not, we get crushed, and that is a huge part of the operating rhythm,” Habib said.
Security remains a major concern around A.I. agents. A Meta researcher recently shared an incident in which OpenClaw ignored instructions and began deleting her email inbox. At Amazon Web Services, an agent called Kiro “deleted and then recreated” a production environment, triggering a 13-hour outage. These cases highlight the risks of insufficient guardrails.
Writer addresses this with layered controls, including a killswitch at the agent, tool, connector and user levels, allowing companies to block unwanted actions. These safeguards are enabled by its cloud-based architecture.
“It’s easy to let an agentic system on your desktop to do whatever the f*** it wants. It is much harder to spend years building the cloud-based solution where connector by connector, you have the ability to decide what user has capabilities to access what type of action,” Habib said. “Being able to map that to [an] agentic workflow… That is really our secret sauce.”
That focus on governance and enterprise-grade control is driving Writer’s traction. Even amid concerns of an A.I. bubble, the company is betting on a durable niche: making A.I.-first actually work. Flashy adoption cycles may fade, but enterprises will continue investing in tools that make core operations more efficient.
