Artificial intelligence startup Writer Inc. today disclosed that it has closed a $200 million Series C investment at a $1.9 billion valuation. 

Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth led the round. They were joined by more than a half dozen other backers including the venture capital arms of Salesforce Inc., Adobe Inc., IBM Corp. and Workday Inc. The raise comes about a year after a $100 million Series B round that reportedly valued Writer at $500 million to $750 million. 

San Francisco-based Writer develops a series of large language models geared towards the enterprise market. The company’s most advanced model, Palmyra X 004, debuted last month. The LLM significantly outperforms GPT-4o at tool use, meaning it more reliably performs tasks that require interacting with external applications such as databases. 

Palmyra X 004 supports prompts with up to 128,000 tokens. A token is a unit of data that holds a few characters or numbers. The LLM can write text, generate code and analyze user-provided datasets for useful patterns.

Writer offers Palmyra X 004 alongside a number of domain-specific models. One LLM, Palmyra Fin, is optimized for financial tasks such as identifying investment risks and explaining market trends. Another LLM called Palmyra Med promises to speed up healthcare professionals’ day-to-day work. 

The company provides its LLMs alongside an offering called Knowledge Graph. It’s a RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, service that enables its models to incorporate data from external sources into their prompt responses. Knowledge Graph can give an AI access to information in PDFs, presentations, charts and other files.

Under the hood, the service uses an LLM to identify how the records provided by a user are connected to one another. Writer says that this approach makes AI models powered by Knowledge Graph less susceptible to hallucinations. According to the company, the service also makes the LLMs it powers more adept at answering complex questions.

“Our reasoning engine powers AI apps that have structured inputs and outputs, allowing you to fit Writer seamlessly into an existing workstream,” Writer co-founder and Chief Executive Officer May Habib wrote in a blog post today. “It also powers agents that can work with other systems, think through complex tasks, and analyze your company data.”

Writer provides application programming interfaces that enable developers to integrate its LLMs and Knowledge Graph offering into their services. For business users, the company offers a no-code tool that makes it possible to create AI applications without any programming. Users can assemble their application’s interface from prebuilt building blocks and customize details such as the style in which prompt responses are generated. 

To help customers quickly put its LLMs to use, Writer provides more than a half dozen prepackaged AI apps. Some are general-purpose tools geared toward tasks such as generating code. There are also more specialized applications, including one that can analyze marketing materials produced by financial institutions for regulatory compliance issues.

Writer will use the proceeds from its newly announced funding round to expand its feature set. As a part of the effort, the company plans to release more AI applications for the healthcare, retail and financial sectors. Writer also plans to expand its LLM lineup with models that are more adapt at reasoning tasks.

Image: Writer