May Habib
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May Habib is a Lebanese-Canadian technology executive and entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Writer, a San Francisco company that builds full-stack enterprise generative AI software around its own family of large language models called Palmyra. She founded the company in 2020 with the engineer Waseem AlShikh, with whom she had earlier built the language-technology startup Qordoba. Under Habib, Writer reached a valuation of $1.9 billion in a November 2024 financing and became one of the most prominent independent challengers in the enterprise AI market.[1][2]
Habib is also recognized in her own right as a founder. She was named to the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Class of 2024, is a fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and is a frequent speaker on the business uses of artificial intelligence.[5][6] The table below summarizes her principal roles.
| Period | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 to 2009 | Lehman Brothers, then Barclays Capital | Investment banking analyst |
| 2009 to 2013 | Mubadala (Abu Dhabi) | Mergers, acquisitions and investments; vice president |
| 2015 to 2020 | Qordoba | Co-founder and chief executive |
| 2020 to present | Writer | Co-founder and chief executive |
May Habib was born in rural Lebanon, the eldest of eight children, and emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of eight.[4][5] She has often described how growing up as an immigrant, repeatedly adapting to unfamiliar surroundings, instilled in her a comfort with risk that later shaped her career as a founder.[4]
Habib attended Harvard University, where she was active on the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, eventually heading its news board.[5] She graduated in 2007 with high honors, earning a degree in economics and Near Eastern languages and civilizations.[4][5]
After Harvard, Habib began her career in finance. She worked as an analyst in investment banking at Lehman Brothers and, after its 2008 collapse, at Barclays Capital in New York. In 2009 she moved to the Middle East to join Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, where she focused on mergers, acquisitions, and investments and rose to vice president.[4][5]
In 2015 Habib left finance to found Qordoba alongside Waseem AlShikh, a software engineer who became her long-term technical partner. Qordoba was a language-technology company that used AI to help global enterprises create and manage content across many languages. It built a network of more than 650 professional linguists across roughly 30 countries and counted customers such as Visa, Marriott, and the NBA.[5] The venture-backed startup later repositioned itself around "content intelligence," applying machine learning to help teams keep large volumes of writing accurate and consistent with a brand's voice.[3]
By 2020, Habib and AlShikh had concluded that the same techniques Qordoba used to translate between human languages could be turned to a broader problem: converting inconsistent, off-brand corporate writing into clear, on-brand text. The 2017 introduction of the transformer architecture in the paper Attention Is All You Need convinced them that generative models would soon be able to write, not merely assist.[3] In September 2020 the founders relaunched the business as Writer, an enterprise generative AI platform, and began signing companies that wanted help producing consistent content at scale.[3]
What set Writer apart was its decision to build its own large language models rather than rely on outside providers such as OpenAI. In early 2023 the company introduced Palmyra, a family of in-house LLMs trained for business use. Habib positioned Writer as a "full-stack" platform that paired the model layer with an application layer, integrated retrieval-augmented generation, AI guardrails, and developer tools. The company argued that owning the whole stack gave enterprises better accuracy, security, and control than stitching together third-party tools.[3][7] In its early years Writer pitched itself as a challenger to Grammarly, then valued at around $13 billion, differentiating on content creation and enterprise-grade privacy and security.[3]
The Palmyra line grew quickly. In October 2024 Writer released Palmyra X 004, a model it said was trained almost entirely on synthetic data for roughly $700,000, and which topped the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard for tool use, ahead of larger models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.[2][9] In April 2025 the company released Palmyra X5, an adaptive-reasoning model with a one-million-token context window aimed at running enterprise AI agents.[8] Writer also built multimodal and domain-specific variants, including a vision model and models tuned for fields such as medicine and finance, and made several Palmyra models available through Amazon Bedrock.[7][12]
Writer raised capital rapidly as enterprise demand for generative AI accelerated. After a $5 million seed round in 2020, it raised a $21 million Series A led by Insight Partners in 2021 and a $100 million Series B in September 2023.[3][11] In November 2024 it announced a $200 million Series C that valued the company at $1.9 billion, co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and existing investor ICONIQ Growth, with participation from corporate investors including Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Workday Ventures. The round brought Writer's total funding to about $326 million.[1][2][10]
By the mid-2020s Writer counted hundreds of large organizations among its customers, including Accenture, Vanguard, Mars, Uber, L'Oreal, Intuit, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Ally Bank, and Prudential, and reported sharp revenue growth as it expanded its customer base.[1][2] Habib has said her ambition is to build a company with a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, and she has steered Writer toward agentic AI that can carry out multi-step business workflows rather than simply generate text.[1] As CEO she has also become a visible commentator on how generative AI will reshape knowledge work, arguing that enterprises should treat AI as a core operating capability rather than a bolt-on tool.
Habib has been widely recognized as a leading founder in enterprise AI. In April 2024 she was named to the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Class of 2024, and she is a fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.[5][6] Writer has appeared on industry lists of notable AI and high-growth private companies, including the Forbes AI 50 and CNBC's Disruptor 50.[1] Earlier in her career, Arabian Business included Habib on its rankings of the most influential young Arabs.[13] She is a frequent speaker on enterprise AI, appearing at venues such as the World Economic Forum, the TED AI conference, and London Tech Week, and is an outspoken advocate for the idea that, as she has put it, the language a person is born speaking should not limit the kind of life they can lead.[4]