"To be clear, we don’t train our models on fake or hallucination data,” says Waseem Alshikh, co-founder of Writer. This dedication to authenticity has propelled Writer from its initial $21 million seed funding in 2021 to an impressive valuation of $1.9 billion as the company seeks to raise up to $200 million in its latest funding round.
Writer has made headlines not just for its valuation, but also for its unique approach to AI model training. The company reported that it spent approximately $700,000 on developing its latest model, a stark contrast to the millions typically invested by competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. This cost-effective strategy involves the use of synthetic data—AI-generated information designed to replicate real-world data while protecting privacy.
Waseem Alshikh, Writer’s co-founder and CTO, emphasized the clarity of their synthetic data approach. “There’s some confusion in the industry about the definition of ‘synthetic’ data,” he noted. “To be clear, we don’t train our models on fake or hallucination data, and we don’t use a model to generate random data. We take real, factual data and convert it to synthetic data that is specifically structured in a clearer and cleaner way for model training.”
