Samanyou Garg

Founder and CEO Writesonic

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Samanyou Garg is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Writesonic. He launched it in October 2020 as one of the first commercial products built on OpenAI’s GPT-3, at a point when the idea that software could write usable marketing copy was still a novelty rather than an industry. Writesonic has since made two further jumps: into SEO automation from 2023, and then into what the company calls the AI search growth engine — helping brands appear in the recommendations that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude give users, a discipline now labelled generative engine optimisation. The through-line is that Garg keeps building for the search behaviour that is arriving rather than the one that exists. He is a University of Manchester computer scientist, a Y Combinator Summer 2021 founder and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honouree, and he has run the company profitably and largely without outside capital since 2021, from India.

Career Highlights

• Founded Writesonic and launched it in October 2020, building one of the first commercial applications of GPT-3.
• Took the company through Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch and raised a $2.6 million seed round from Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund.
• Reached profitability in 2021 and has grown the business since largely on internal cash rather than further venture funding.
• Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia for consumer technology in 2023.
• Won a 2019 Global Undergraduate Award for research on group emotion recognition using machine learning, while still an undergraduate at Manchester.
• Extended the platform from AI copywriting into SEO automation in 2023, shipping an automated SEO AI agent among the earliest of its kind, and then into generative engine optimisation.
• Grew to more than 10,000 customers across enterprises, agencies, e-commerce and growth teams, with over two billion AI conversations processed through the platform, according to the company.
• Partnered with Microsoft in July 2024 to run Writesonic on Azure for enterprise-grade scalability and data privacy.
• Shipped a family of adjacent products including Chatsonic, Botsonic, Photosonic and TLDR This.
• Previously founded Zesture, a computer-vision product for touch-free control of media and presentation software, which he closed for lack of product-market fit.

Professional Journey

Garg read computer science at the University of Manchester, and it was there that he produced the research that first brought him attention: a machine-learning approach to group emotion recognition, which won a Global Undergraduate Award in 2019. He then worked as a full-stack AI developer at Deloitte Digital.

His first venture was Zesture, which used computer-vision models to let people control media, entertainment and presentation software without touching anything. It did not find a market and he shut it down. That failure matters to the shape of what followed: Zesture was a technology looking for a use, and Writesonic began the other way round.

In 2020, when OpenAI opened access to GPT-3, Garg was writing marketing content for his own work and wanted a tool that would do it for him. He built one. Writesonic launched in October 2020 as one of the first generative AI products on the market and found traction quickly — early enough that it was establishing itself while most of the industry was still arguing about whether large language models were useful. The company entered Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch and raised a $2.6 million seed round from Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. It reached profitability the same year and has not needed to raise again.

From 2023 Garg pushed the product past writing and into distribution. AI copywriting was becoming commoditised; what customers actually wanted was traffic. Writesonic moved into AI-enhanced search engine optimisation and shipped an automated SEO agent, among the first products to hand an autonomous agent a site’s optimisation work rather than merely suggesting edits. In July 2024 the company partnered with Microsoft to move onto Azure infrastructure, a prerequisite for the enterprise customers it was starting to serve.

The most recent shift is the largest. As users increasingly ask a model rather than a search engine, the question for a brand stops being where it ranks and becomes whether it gets mentioned at all. Writesonic repositioned around generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation, connecting AI visibility measurement to content strategy. The company reports more than 10,000 customers, over two billion AI conversations processed, and more than $2 million in annual recurring revenue attributable to AI search — figures it publishes itself and which are not independently verified. Garg runs the operation as a remote team of over fifty engineers, AI researchers and growth operators, from New Delhi.

Education

University of Manchester

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science