Earlier this month, Writer co-founder and CEO May Habib took the stage in HumanX conference in San Francisco to discuss with Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarene why so many companies’ AI strategies are failing. In a landscape where 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver returnsThe writer has carved a role helping Fortune 500 companies build AI agents and automated workflows that integrate with existing systems. Its offerings include Writer Agent, a multi-step task execution platform and Palmyraa proprietary family of large language models built for enterprise use. The San Francisco-based startup last raised $200 million in November 2024 at a valuation of $1.9 billion. If a gold rush rewards shovel salesmen, the AI race rewards practical application.
Habib and its co-founder and CTO, Waseem Alshikhmet in Dubai in 2011 after she contacted him on Twitter about his work in statistical machine translation. The relationship quickly turned into a partnership, leading to the launch of i’m sorrya startup focused on AI-powered content localization. In 2020, they co-founded Writer.
“Honestly, I think it’s one of the top 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 the 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 oldest of eight children and the only one who spoke English, she often served as a translator, 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 founding Qordoba.
At Writer, the co-founders maintain a complementary dynamic: Habib represents the voice of the customer, while Alshikh represents the technology. The company was initially positioned as a “AI writing assistant for professional usershelping organizations scale communication. In early 2025, it shifted its focus to AI 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’ve leveraged our product, with the auditability, 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 Financial Ally, AstraZeneca, Cygnus, Clorox, ComcastFranklin Templeton, Mr. Pepper Dr, Lennar, Marriott, MARCH, Uber AND vanguard.
One of its most prominent clients is Salesforcewhere more than 3,000 employees use Writer to search 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 for generate content for 37,000 websites during his presentation of Experiences.
While many AI startups emerged after ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, Writer predates the boom and saw it as competition.
“You know, it sharpened our pencils. It sharpened our delivery. A lot of the speed and the speed of our product, we owe to that great competition coming into 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 the Observer. “What protected them was what they had already built: regulatory compliance, deep customization, and a proprietary model family that gives customers full control over their data and results.”
Asked why many companies struggle to deploy AI, Habib noted a focus on incremental improvements rather than structural changes.
“I think taking 54 submissions in a process and making it 27 is not just uninspiring, it just doesn’t work. Change management is torture,” she said. “You need a radical new model for how work is done … to support these end-to-end workflow transformations.”
Companies that get caught up in legacy processes risk being left behind. As an AI-first company, Writer emphasizes speed and determination. “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’s a big part of the pace of operation,” Habib said.
Security remains a major concern around AI agents. or Meta the researcher recently shared an incident in which OpenClaw ignored the instructions and started deleting her email inbox. IN Amazon Online Servicesan agent named Kiro”it is deleted and then recreated” a production environment, causing a 13-hour outage. These cases highlight the dangers of inadequate guardrails.
Writer addresses this with layered controls, including a kill switch 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 agent system on your desktop do whatever f*** it wants. It’s much harder to spend years building a cloud-based solution where connector by connector, you have the ability to decide which user has the ability to access what kind of action,” Habib said. “Being able to put that into (an) agency workflow … That’s really our secret sauce.”
This focus on enterprise-level governance and control is driving Writer’s appeal. Even amid concerns about an AI bubble, the company is betting on a stable niche: making AI work first. The miracle cycles of adoption may fade, but enterprises will continue to invest in tools that make core operations more efficient.
