- Writer is a full-stack enterprise AI platform valued at $1.9 billion, serving over 300 customers including Uber, Salesforce, Accenture, and L’Oréal.
- May Habib fled Lebanon at age eight, grew up in Canada as the eldest of eight siblings, and became the first woman in her family to attend college.
- Habib studied economics and Near Eastern languages at Harvard, worked in investment banking and sovereign wealth, then founded her first startup in 2014.
- Writer has raised $369 million in total funding, with its $200 million Series C led by Premji Invest and Radical Ventures closing in November 2024.
Writer is not another ChatGPT wrapper. The San Francisco-based platform builds its own large language models — the Palmyra family — and wraps them in a full-stack application layer purpose-built for enterprises. Over 300 companies, from Uber to Vanguard to Qualcomm, use Writer to deploy AI agents, generate content, and automate workflows across their organizations. The platform’s latest model, Palmyra X5, ships with a one-million-token context window and was trained for just $1 million in compute — a fraction of what frontier labs spend.
Behind all of it is May Habib, a 38-year-old Lebanese-Canadian CEO who built her career at the intersection of language, technology, and relentless execution. Her path from a war zone to a $1.9 billion valuation runs through Harvard, Wall Street, Abu Dhabi, and a failed startup that nearly ended everything.
Eight Years Old, Eight Siblings, and a New Country
Habib was born in rural Lebanon. When she was eight, her family fled to Canada — part of the wave of Lebanese families displaced by the country’s long civil conflict. She was the eldest of eight children. Her parents spoke no English.
From the start, Habib became the family’s translator. She navigated school systems, bank appointments, and bureaucracies in a language she was still learning herself. The experience left a mark: language was not just communication. It was access, power, and survival.
”The language you were born speaking shouldn’t impact the kind of life you end up leading.” — May Habib
Her parents were entrepreneurs by necessity. One of her earliest memories in Canada was watching her father and uncle buy used cars, fix them, and sell them. Nobody taught them business. They figured it out because they had to.
Harvard, Wall Street, and a Sovereign Wealth Fund
Habib earned her BA in economics and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard University, where she served as associate managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. She was the first woman in her family to attend college.
After graduation, she moved to New York and worked in investment banking, covering technology deals. Then she joined Mubadala Development Company, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, investing in tech companies across the Middle East. The role gave her a global view of how technology scaled — and where language created friction in global business.
By 2012, she had started working on natural language processing and machine translation problems. The finance career was over. The obsession with language and AI had begun.
2014: A Localization Startup Called Qordoba
In 2014, Habib co-founded Qordoba with Waseem Alshikh, a machine learning engineer. The premise was simple: the global localization market was worth $35 billion, and no tech company had seized it. Qordoba raised $1.5 million in seed funding and set out to build an AI-powered translation platform.
The company grew. Qordoba worked with over 650 linguists across 30 countries, serving clients like Visa, Marriott, and the NBA. But the real breakthrough came in June 2017, when Google published “Attention Is All You Need” — the paper that introduced the transformer architecture. Habib and Alshikh saw the future immediately. Language models were about to change everything, and they were already building in the space.
2020: Qordoba Dies, Writer Is Born
The pivot came in early 2020. Habib killed Qordoba and relaunched the company as Writer — an AI writing platform for enterprises. The timing was brutal. COVID-19 hit weeks later, freezing the fundraising market and gutting enterprise budgets.
”The story of Writer is the story of the transformer. We started the company to build models, and with every big step-function change, we’ve either led it or been four weeks behind.” — May Habib
Most founders would have waited. Habib doubled down. Writer started building its own proprietary LLMs — the Palmyra series — while competitors relied on OpenAI’s API. The bet was contrarian: enterprises would want a platform that owned its models, offered data privacy, and could be deployed on-premise. She was right.
$369 Million Raised and 300 Enterprise Customers
Writer’s growth since 2020 has been aggressive. The company raised a $100 million Series B in September 2023, led by ICONIQ Growth, with revenues growing 10x in the prior two years. Then came the $200 million Series C in November 2024, co-led by Premji Invest and Radical Ventures, valuing Writer at $1.9 billion. Total funding: $369 million.
The investor list reads like a who’s who of enterprise tech: Adobe Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, IBM Ventures, Workday Ventures, and Citi Ventures all participated. Customers include Accenture, Uber, L’Oréal, Intuit, Vanguard, Qualcomm, Prudential, and Franklin Templeton. Writer reports a 9x average return on investment for its clients.
In April 2025, Writer released Palmyra X5, an adaptive reasoning LLM with a one-million-token context window. The model outperformed competitors on enterprise benchmarks while costing a fraction to train — proof that Habib’s full-stack approach was working.
The Full-Stack Bet on Enterprise AI
Habib’s thesis is that the enterprise AI market will not be won by the biggest model. It will be won by the most complete platform. Writer offers the model layer (Palmyra), a built-in retrieval-augmented generation system, a knowledge graph for proprietary company data, AI guardrails, and a suite of prebuilt applications — all in one stack.
”If DeepSeek proved anything to the world, it’s that you don’t need billions of dollars to do this. Necessity is the mother of all invention. We invented using synthetic data.” — May Habib
She spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2024. Writer now competes directly with Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI for enterprise AI contracts — and wins deals that those giants lose on flexibility and data privacy.
The eight-year-old girl who translated for her parents in a Canadian immigration office now runs a company that processes language at scale for the world’s largest corporations. The mission has not changed. Only the scope.
