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May Habib

May Habib is co-founder and chief executive of Writer, a New York-based enterprise generative AI platform, and has become a prominent voice on how large companies deploy AI in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and life sciences [1][14][18]. Born in a small village in Lebanon near the Syrian border, she was the eldest of eight children in a family that emigrated to Canada in 1990, an experience she has described as formative for her willingness to take risks and act as a translator of both language and culture within her family [13][15][16]. She studied economics and languages at Harvard University, where she also worked on the staff of the Harvard Crimson, before starting her career as an analyst at Lehman Brothers and later serving as a vice president at the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Development Company [8][9][10][11][13].

Habib's entrepreneurial path began around 2015 when she co-founded Qordoba with Wasim Khaled, initially building a statistical machine-translation service that used a network of human translators to generate training data, before pivoting into a localization product that automatically produced translated strings for software applications [6][16]. In September 2020, amid the shift toward transformer-based language models, she and her co-founder shut down Qordoba, despite investor pressure to keep monetizing its revenue, to found Writer, betting that language would become the primary interface to machine intelligence [5][16]. She has said the company deliberately chose to target large enterprises rather than pursue a self-serve consumer or small-business model, viewing that as the harder but more consequential path [15][16].

Under Habib, Writer has pursued what she calls a "full stack" strategy, developing its own large language models trained partly on synthetic data while also allowing customers to plug in third-party models such as those accessed through Amazon Bedrock [14][16][17]. She has argued that training specialized models on synthetic data derived from real factual sources can produce enterprise-ready performance at a fraction of the cost of larger general-purpose models, citing a $700 million cost comparison in one interview, and has pushed back on concerns that synthetic data leads to hallucination by distinguishing her company's approach from low-quality data generation [17]. She contends that many corporate AI pilots fail to show return on investment because executives deploy narrow productivity tools like copilots rather than committing to full workflow redesign, pointing to examples such as automated medical-record summarization and regulatory submissions as cases where deeper integration pays off [14][18]. Writer's customers have included companies such as Uber, Salesforce, Vanguard, Accenture, Mars, and AstraZeneca, and Habib has said the company works to build "context management systems" that improve with repeated use inside a client's operations, which she presents as a competitive advantage over larger AI labs [14][16][18].

Habib has also spoken about the position of women in the technology and finance sectors, noting that her earlier career in manufacturing, investment banking, and private equity was male-dominated, and that she has deliberately built Writer's workforce to be close to gender-balanced [15]. She has raised concerns about diminishing industry attention to bias and representation in AI systems, citing the example of image-generation tools altering a person's apparent race as a trust failure that enterprise customers would not accept [14]. Reflecting on Writer's growth into a company valued at more than one billion dollars with backing exceeding $300 million, she has framed the venture as a continuation of the same underlying interest in language technology that she pursued at Qordoba, now applied to what she describes as agentic, full-stack AI for the enterprise [13][16].

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