"We Don't Need 5,000 People to Build AI" Explains the Duo Behind Writer's Rise to Enterprise AI Stardom

From a chance Twitter connection to a $1.9 billion valuation, Writer's path to becoming a major force in enterprise AI reflects both the rapid evolution of language technology and the power of focused innovation. The company, which recently secured $200 million in Series C funding, has come a long way from its origins in machine translation.

A Twitter Connection That Changed Everything

Over a decade ago, in a small Twitter community of computer scientists in Dubai, May Habib noticed an intriguing post about project algorithms and Java. The author was Waseem AlShikh, a Syrian developer who had taught himself English while pursuing computer science in Lebanon.

"I can't waste two years studying just language," Waseem recalls of his college days. "Not my thing. I can't do it. I want to move fast." This drive led him to develop his own summarization tool, refining it through trial and error. "I started getting a lot of A's," he says, describing how he condensed 2,000-page textbooks into 100 pages of essential content.

His first attempt with a rule-based model wasn't successful. "I know it's failed because I used that tool to summarize a few courses and when I end up study all the summarization, I went to the exam," Waseem explains. "Well, it was not great." After three months of developing more advanced statistical models, his results improved dramatically. "I finished the whole four years working at a restaurant, saving money, improving the software, and studying the summary. So from a 2000-page book, I only study a hundred pages."