Stew Fortier

QuHarrison Terry presents Stew Fortier, CEO of Type, with the WTF Innovators Award for creating an AI-infused word processor application and bringing the power of LLMs closer to the native creation process.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Gotta Type”, produced by Nimso, to Stew Fortier.

Type is an AI-powered document editor that generates text that matches the content, formatting, and style of your doc. They are reimagining every component of the document editor to infuse it with speed, intelligence, and delight. At any point in the writing process, users can summon a powerful large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas, finish a sentence, generate a new paragraph, etc.

The word processor is one of the most fundamental platforms for all professionals. LLMs are inherently proficient at writing. Therefore, it is a natural fit to bring LLMs into the word processor. With an LLM in the doc editor, writers can give more context to what they’re writing and ask the AI to pick where they left off. Instead of prompting the AI to generate a net-new text, it’s a much more collaborative back-and-forth.

The next evolution for generative AI is to integrate the power of these tools directly in the software that creators are most familiar with. Stew has been creating software and tools that aid writers for many years and knows exactly what they need to level up their abilities. A human-centered approach to augmenting writers is at the forefront of his mind. – QuHarrison Terry.

Type raised a $2.8M seed round, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater, Rogue Capital, Ascend, Cervin, Omega Venture Partners.

Prior to founding Type, Stew Fortier co-founded Foster, a Y Combinator company, which provided editorial support for online writers. He was the CTO in Residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he spun out WellSaid Labs, a text-to-speech generator. Additionally, he’s held the position of CTO at Banzai through their Series A and CTO at MassRoots through their $45M public listing.