May Habib

When May Habib's family fled rural Lebanon for Canada in the 1990s, eight-year-old May carried a conviction that would reshape how the world's largest companies think about language and AI. Today, as CEO of Writer - the enterprise AI platform valued at £1.5 billion - she's ensuring "the language you were born speaking shouldn't impact the kind of life you end up leading."

The eldest of eight children, May watched her immigrant parents become entrepreneurs by necessity in Canada. Her earliest business education came from observing her father and uncle buy used cars, fix them, and sell them - a lesson in resourcefulness that proved invaluable when bootstrapping companies through uncertain times.

May's path began at Harvard, pursuing Economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations - a pairing that captured her dual fascination with business and linguistic complexity. As Associate Managing Editor of The Harvard Crimson, she discovered a lifelong truth: writing forces you to think through problems with "utter crispness."

Graduating with high honours in 2007, she landed at Lehman Brothers as an investment banking analyst. The timing was brutal - she experienced the 2008 financial crisis firsthand, watching her employer collapse and transitioning to Barclays Capital. Rather than scarring her, the experience taught her to be "comfortable being uncomfortable, being scared."

Her most formative experience came next: Abu Dhabi in 2009, joining Mubadala Development Company, the UAE's sovereign wealth fund. As M&A Director, she helped build a technology portfolio now worth over £16 billion, working with a small team that invested £3.2 billion in global tech companies. The role deepened her understanding of how language barriers constrain business expansion.

By 2012, May was experimenting with natural language processing on nights and weekends, collaborating with computer scientist Waseem AlShikh through a small Twitter community in Dubai. Their online friendship - six months of discussions about algorithms and Java - evolved into a decade-long partnership that would reshape enterprise AI.

In March 2015, May left finance to co-found Qordoba with Waseem. The concept was elegantly simple: help companies localise content using AI-powered translation. Working with over 650 linguists across 30 countries, Qordoba served Visa, Marriott, and the NBA, processing over 2 billion words daily.

The company raised £16.4 million across two rounds, but May learned crucial lessons about scaling too quickly. "The worst advice I took was hiring VPs too early before the company was ready," she reflects. More importantly, she and Waseem were mastering transformer technology - influenced by the groundbreaking 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper - years before ChatGPT made AI mainstream.

By 2020, Qordoba had tripled revenue year-over-year, but faced a strategic crossroads. Rather than forcing an evolution, they made the bold decision to start completely fresh.

In August 2020, May and Waseem incorporated Writer with a focused mission: apply transformer technology to help enterprises create consistent, on-brand content at scale. The timing seemed counterintuitive - COVID-19 was ravaging the economy, and enterprise AI was largely theoretical.

Writer's approach was deliberately different. While others built general-purpose AI tools, May focused obsessively on enterprise needs: security, compliance, and business-specific use cases. "We made a contrarian bet to build our own models 18 months before ChatGPT when investors were sceptical," she explains. Developing proprietary foundation models - the Palmyra family of LLMs - gave Writer unprecedented control over quality and customisation.

The market validated this spectacularly. Writer raised £98.7 million through September 2023, reaching a £390 million valuation. The breakthrough came in November 2024 with a £156 million Series C, quadrupling valuation to £1.5 billion in just 14 months.

At Writer's heart lies May's partnership with co-founder Waseem, whom she describes as her "best friend." Their relationship exemplifies authentic co-founder dynamics. "We're very yin and yang," May explains, with her focusing on broader strategy while Waseem handles technical challenges.

They operate on radical transparency - openly disagreeing in front of their team, demonstrating that conflicting viewpoints are necessary when built on deep trust. "Our families are so close" that business extends beyond professional boundaries, creating stability needed for high-growth scaling.

This partnership has been crucial during explosive growth. Writer now serves over 250 enterprise customers including Uber, Salesforce, L'Oréal, and Intuit, achieving over 200% net revenue retention. The top 25% of users spend 2.5+ hours daily in the platform - engagement reflecting genuine value creation.

May's immigrant experience continues shaping Writer's development. Initially focusing on English - rather than the multilingual approach that drove Qordoba - created personal anguish. "It felt like an abandonment of our translation mission, selling out a bit." Only when Writer expanded to support 32 languages could she "breathe a little."

Selected as a 2024 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, May joins an exclusive cohort recognised for driving global transformation. Her inclusion in Forbes' AI 50 reflects thought leadership in responsible AI development.

As a TechWadi board member, she bridges Silicon Valley and Middle Eastern entrepreneurship. Her Aspen Institute fellowship demonstrates commitment to values-based leadership beyond business metrics.

These recognitions amplify her core message: AI has potential to be "ten, maybe a hundred times more equity-creating or equity-exacerbating, depending on how we shape it."

As a mother living between San Francisco and London, May has made strategic choices supporting both entrepreneurial ambitions and family commitments. She deliberately "wanted to have my entrepreneurial life figured out before I had kids," working backwards from that goal.