May Habib

May Habib is co-founder and CEO of Writer, an enterprise generative-AI platform for on-brand, policy-aware writing and knowledge work. Born in Lebanon and raised in Canada after her family emigrated, she built a career across finance and localization before betting early on transformers for the enterprise.

Lebanon, Canada, and Harvard

Her family left Lebanon for Canada when she was young; she has described watching her parents become entrepreneurs out of necessity and filing away the lesson that institutions do not grant stability. She studied economics (and Near Eastern languages) at Harvard, worked the news desk at The Harvard Crimson, and graduated with high honors in 2007. She joined Lehman Brothers as an analyst, lived through the firm's collapse into Barclays, then moved to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala as an M&A director helping build a large technology portfolio. Language barriers in global business planted the seed for her later companies.

From Qordoba to Writer

In 2015 she co-founded Qordoba with Waseem AlShikh, an AI-assisted localization and multilingual content platform that sold into large enterprises. In late 2019, while still on that work, the pair saw transformers as a step change for generative language. They launched Writer in early 2020, choosing the enterprise lane they already knew from Qordoba, and eventually built Writer's own Palmyra family of models rather than renting a frontier API as the core stack. On Writer's Humans of AI conversation she called that choice deliberately contrarian: "We built our own models even as folks said, 'Hey, these frontier models are getting more powerful and cheaper, why don't you just build on them?' and that has really proven to be what the enterprise needs."

Enterprise control and brand voice

Under Habib the company stayed aimed at enterprises that need brand voice, policy, retrieval over private knowledge, and auditability, not consumer chat demos. Writer's public product line treats generation as something that must live inside existing workflows with guardrails, graph-style retrieval, and controls over where data goes. She has talked about shared risk between vendor and customer when generative AI enters regulated work, and about building trust through transparency rather than hype.

On equity and language

On Humans of AI she tied the company's language focus to personal history: "The language you were born speaking shouldn't impact the kind of life you end up leading." She also warned that generative AI can amplify inequality if builders are careless: "AI has both the potential and the risk to be ten, maybe a hundred times more equity-creating or equity-exacerbating, depending on how we shape it." Comfort with discomfort is a recurring theme: "I do think over time I've gotten comfortable being uncomfortable, being scared."