WRITER is building an end-to-end, agentic AI platform for the world’s largest enterprises. Working with Fortune 500 leaders like Uber, Prudential and Vanguard, WRITER powers governed AI agents that automate complex workflows at scale
From Language Barriers to Intelligence at Work
May Habib’s relationship with language started early. The eldest child in a family that immigrated from Lebanon to Canada, she often served as the household interpreter — an experience that made the limits of language feel urgent and practical. After studying languages at Harvard, May met her future co-founder and CTO, Waseem. The pair began by building translation and localization products: first a services-plus-ML venture that generated training data and models; then a developer-facing localization startup that auto-opened GitHub PRs with localized strings.
In 2020, they founded WRITER with a clear conviction: language was becoming the interface to intelligence, and enterprises would need AI that was accurate, governed, and deeply integrated.
Why Full-Stack Matters
From day one, WRITER chose a full-stack approach: train and operate its own Palmyra models, run enterprise-grade infrastructure, and ship productized applications and agent tooling. The goal wasn’t control for its own sake — it was to translate research into product in weeks, not quarters, and to deliver the reliability and governance that mission-critical deployments demand.
Finding (and Re-Finding) Product-Market Fit
In May’s view, generative AI companies don’t “arrive” at PMF; they re-establish it continuously. In a noisy market where executives and end users can try new models daily, the bar keeps moving. WRITER’s answer is relentless depth: enterprise memory management, context engineering, controls and auditability, and delivery playbooks tuned to real systems and processes. That’s how WRITER wins and re-wins inside organizations where switching costs are low but operational stakes are high.
How Enterprises Really Adopt AI
Large companies are more innovative than they’re given credit for, but their tech stacks span eras, geographies, and hundreds of instances of the same tool. That makes scaling AI a change-management challenge as much as a modeling challenge. WRITER co-develops with customers from prototype to production, connects to live data, and helps teams redesign workflows so savings and outcomes actually materialize. The result: multi-year partnerships, champions who grow into bigger roles, and AI that touches tens of thousands of employees.
Fundraising as Strategy Work
WRITER has raised over $300M, most recently near a $2B valuation. For May, fundraising happens in focused sprints every 14–18 months and serves a purpose beyond capital: it forces long-range alignment across research, product, and go-to-market. The story is simple but ambitious: operate one of the few labs training frontier, enterprise-grade models, productize breakthroughs quickly, and give enterprises an agentic platform they can trust at scale.
Looking Ahead
WRITER began with language; it now builds intelligence. With a highly productive engineering, product, and design team, the company is shipping more in six weeks than many teams did in a year a decade ago. The next chapter focuses on running core business functions agentically — with governance, memory, and interoperability as first principles — so global organizations can work faster, safer, and smarter.
“Our vision is to empower the people closest to the work to transform the way work gets done.”
Radical Ventures is proud to back founders like May Habib who turn lived insight into durable, enterprise-ready AI.
