Automated Style Guide Raises $21M - Online Writing Tool

Maintaining Brand Voice: Writer Secures $21 Million in Series A Funding

Ensuring a unified voice across all communications presents a significant hurdle for companies, organizations, and individual writers alike. Writer, a burgeoning startup, proposes a solution through an intelligent, integrated style guide that surpasses simple error detection. Building on a $5 million seed round received last year, the company has successfully secured $21 million in Series A funding to fuel continued growth and service enhancement.

The Challenge of Consistent Writing

May Habib, Founder and CEO, posits that writing represents “the last unstructured business process.” While perhaps a somewhat optimistic view, this assertion highlights a crucial point upon which to build a successful enterprise. Writing, at its core, is a creative endeavor. Systematically managing this process is essential to leverage writing as a powerful business tool.

Verifying copy for accuracy is one matter; ensuring stylistic harmony among numerous writers, adherence to appropriate phrasing, and consistent tone aligned with leadership’s vision is quite another. Style guides exist – even TechCrunch maintains one – but professional writers understand the difficulty of pausing for consultation mid-flow.

Writer: Your On-Demand Style Guide

Writer functions as a virtual style guide, providing real-time guidance as you write. It integrates with platforms like Chrome and Word, instantly identifying issues ranging from typos to deviations from established company tone. As Habib explains, the platform transforms extensive, 80- to 90-page guidelines into a readily accessible web application, serving as a definitive source of truth.

Importantly, Writer operates without utilizing a client’s content for training purposes, thereby mitigating risks associated with data privacy regulations like HIPAA and security breaches.

Image Credits: Writer

This approach not only ensures clean copy but also facilitates proactive measures, such as promoting inclusive language. Companies may not have formally addressed gender-neutral language or preferred terminology for diverse groups within their style guides. However, Writer incorporates these considerations, allowing users to activate relevant features for consistently inclusive communication.

Users can also configure rules concerning common elements like hyphenation, spacing, date and location formatting, and the use of serial commas.

Growth and New Features

While you may already be familiar with Writer from coverage in 2020, significant developments have occurred since then. Beyond the new funding, the company is experiencing rapid expansion. Staff numbers have nearly doubled, growing from 14 to 25 employees, and a growing roster of prominent clients has been secured.

These clients include Twitter, Intuit, Pinterest, Accenture, Deloitte, and UnitedHealthcare, among approximately 150 others. This expanding client base has contributed to a tripling of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) over the past year, alongside consistent growth in Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs).

Buoyed by positive customer feedback, Writer is diversifying its offerings, moving beyond correction and guidance towards automation. While “automated writing” may raise concerns, it’s about achieving consistency in professional communication. This includes intelligently deploying text snippets, a common industry practice.

The application now supports multiple teams within an organization, preventing conflicting definitions or recommendations between departments like sales and editorial. Figma integration, a frequently requested feature, has also been implemented, recognizing the increasing integration of style into broader design systems.

The Future: AI-Powered Writing Assistance

The most ambitious feature remains under development: a sophisticated, language-aware AI system. This system, independently developed, aims to rival the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-3 in understanding context and content. Further details regarding its development will be revealed in the future.

The Writer founding team: Peter Hatch, creative director; Julia Vaughan, operations; Waseem Alshikh, co-founder and CTO. Image Credits: Writer

The potential applications are clear. An AI that understands the writing context can offer suggestions based on nuanced concepts like overall tone or intent. For example, it could automatically suggest approved standard copy when drafting a company’s refund policy, eliminating the need for manual searches or style guide consultations.

Furthermore, it could identify instances of overly technical language or jargon and recommend rewrites for improved clarity.

Looking Ahead

With $21 million in new funding, Writer is poised for continued expansion and recruitment. The funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Gradient Ventures, the Todd and Rahul Angel Fund, and a host of individual investors including Scott Belsky, Oliver Jay, Jack Altman, Allison Pickens, Packy McCormick, Lenny Rachitsky, Austin Rief, Ankur Nagpal, Alex MacCaw, Camille Ricketts, Vivek Sodera, Julia Lipton and James Beshara.

Stay tuned for further updates on Writer’s advancements in language AI.