Grammarly
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Grammarly is a cloud-based writing assistant that checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity, and tone across more than 500,000 applications and websites. Founded in 2009 by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs, the product grew from a niche tool for students into one of the most widely used artificial intelligence writing platforms in the world, with over 30 million daily active users and more than 70,000 professional teams relying on it. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver.
In April 2023, Grammarly launched GrammarlyGO, its generative AI feature powered by large language models. In late 2024 and 2025, the company acquired both Coda and Superhuman, rebranding its parent entity as Superhuman Platform Inc. while keeping the Grammarly product name intact.
Grammarly was founded in 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine, by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider. Lytvyn and Shevchenko met as students at the International Christian University in Ukraine, where they became friends and began collaborating on software projects. Together with Lider, they built MyDropBox, a plagiarism-detection tool used by academic institutions. They sold MyDropBox to the education technology company Blackboard in 2008 for an undisclosed amount.
While building the plagiarism detector, the founders noticed a pattern. Many students who plagiarized were not cheating out of laziness. They were struggling to express ideas in their own voice in English, a language that was not native to them. This observation led to a question: what if there were a tool that could help people write more effectively, so they would not need to copy from others? That question became the basis for Grammarly.
The founders bootstrapped the company with less than $1 million of their own money. For the first several years, Grammarly operated without any outside venture capital. The initial product was a subscription-based grammar checker aimed at students and academic writers, sold directly through the Grammarly website. The company did not pursue aggressive marketing. Instead, word-of-mouth adoption grew steadily among university students, educators, and writers who found the tool through online searches.
Grammarly's early years were financially precarious. In a 2025 CNBC profile, the founders described a period when the company nearly ran out of money. The big, risky bet of self-funding the company through its early years left them close to broke and unemployed. But by 2012, the product had attracted a sufficient user base to sustain itself, and the founders chose to keep growing organically rather than seeking outside funding.
By 2015, Grammarly crossed one million daily active users. The company relocated its headquarters from Kyiv to San Francisco to be closer to the technology ecosystem and talent pool in Silicon Valley, though it kept its engineering operations in Ukraine. The founding team maintained strong ties to Kyiv, and engineering remained a core function of the Ukrainian office throughout the company's growth.
In October 2015, Grammarly released a free browser extension for Google Chrome, which became the single most important product decision in the company's history. Before the extension, users had to copy and paste text into Grammarly's web editor. The browser extension removed that friction entirely, allowing anyone to get real-time grammar and spelling checks directly in Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and thousands of other websites. This freemium model, where basic grammar checking was free and advanced features required a subscription, drove rapid adoption.
The Chrome extension grew so quickly that Grammarly became one of the most-installed browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store. Grammarly later released extensions for Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, along with native desktop applications for Windows and macOS, and keyboard apps for iOS and Android.
By 2017, daily active users had reached 7 million, and the company was already profitable. That year, Grammarly raised its first outside investment: a $110 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from IVP and Spark Capital. The round valued the company at approximately $1 billion. This was unusual in the startup world; most companies raise outside funding long before reaching profitability. Grammarly had been generating enough revenue to sustain itself for years before letting investors in.
In 2019, Grammarly raised a $90 million Series B, again with General Catalyst participating, at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. The company expanded beyond individual consumers, launching Grammarly Business to serve teams and organizations with shared style guides, tone settings, and administrative controls. By 2020, daily active users surpassed 30 million, fueled in part by the shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased reliance on written communication tools.
In November 2021, Grammarly raised $200 million in a funding round led by Baillie Gifford and funds managed by BlackRock. This round valued the company at $13 billion, placing it among the most valuable private software companies in the world. Both co-founders, Lytvyn and Shevchenko, became billionaires as a result. At the time, the company reported it was cash-flow positive and profitable, and that over 30,000 teams were using Grammarly Business.
In May 2023, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury became CEO, the first outside CEO in the company's history. Roy-Chowdhury had previously led the Privacy, Safety, and Security teams at Google, and also oversaw product management for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. His appointment signaled a shift toward enterprise sales and AI integration.
In February 2024, the company laid off 230 employees (82 in the United States, approximately 37 in Ukraine, and the remainder across other locations). The company stated the restructuring was not about cost-cutting but about reorganizing roles and teams to invest more in AI development. Grammarly provided affected employees with at least three months of base pay. US-based employees received six months of continued health insurance.
In May 2025, Grammarly secured $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, bringing total capital raised to over $1.55 billion. This funding round preserved the $13 billion equity valuation from 2021. Non-dilutive financing means existing shareholders did not have their ownership stakes reduced. Grammarly indicated the capital would fund acquisitions and accelerate its transformation from a writing assistant into a broader AI productivity platform.
In December 2024, Grammarly announced its acquisition of Coda, a collaborative workspace platform used by over 50,000 teams at companies including Figma, DoorDash, Square, and The New York Times. The deal closed in January 2025. Coda's co-founder and CEO, Shishir Mehrotra (who had previously worked at YouTube and Microsoft), replaced Roy-Chowdhury as Grammarly's CEO.
The acquisition gave Grammarly access to Coda Brain, a feature that connects to hundreds of enterprise integrations to provide AI assistants with richer context about an organization's knowledge base. The combined company planned to integrate Coda Docs as a first-party surface for Grammarly's AI assistant, creating a single platform where users could write, collaborate, and manage AI-powered workflows.
On June 30, 2025, Grammarly announced the acquisition of Superhuman, an AI-native email client that claimed to help users respond one to two days faster and save four hours per week on email. Superhuman had raised more than $114 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), IVP, and Tiger Global, at a valuation of $825 million. Superhuman's CEO Rahul Vohra and over 100 employees joined Grammarly.
On October 29, 2025, Grammarly rebranded its parent company as Superhuman Platform Inc. The Grammarly writing assistant product continued to operate under its original name. The combined entity positions email, collaborative documents, and writing assistance as an integrated AI productivity suite.
Grammarly's core technology combines rule-based systems with machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP). The system processes text through several stages:
The system also uses reinforcement learning. When users accept or reject suggestions, that feedback improves future recommendations over time. This feedback loop allows the system to adapt to evolving language patterns and user preferences.
Grammarly's checks fall into four categories:
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Correctness | Grammar, spelling, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, tense consistency |
| Clarity | Conciseness, readability, wordy phrases, passive voice detection |
| Engagement | Word choice variety, sentence structure variation, vocabulary strength |
| Delivery | Tone analysis, formality level, confidence, politeness |
Premium and Pro users also get a plagiarism checker that compares text against billions of web pages and academic databases.
GrammarlyGO is Grammarly's generative AI feature, announced on March 9, 2023, via a Business Wire press release, and rolled out in beta starting April 2023. It uses large language models to go beyond corrective suggestions and actively generate, rewrite, and transform text. The name "GrammarlyGO" reflects the idea that users can prompt the AI to "go" and produce content on their behalf, rather than simply correcting what they have already written.
GrammarlyGO can compose new text from user prompts, rewrite existing passages for different tones or lengths, generate email replies based on incoming message context, and create outlines for longer documents. Users can set preferences for their preferred tone (formal, casual, friendly, confident, diplomatic, etc.) and their professional role (marketer, engineer, student, executive, etc.), so that generated text matches their voice and context.
The compose feature lets users describe what they want to write in a few words, and GrammarlyGO generates a draft. The rewrite feature takes existing text and restructures it for a different audience or purpose. For emails, the tool reads the incoming message and proposes a contextually appropriate reply.
One of GrammarlyGO's distinguishing features, launched in October 2023, is its ability to learn a user's personal writing style. After analyzing a user's past writing, the system can apply that style to newly generated text, producing output that sounds more like the individual user rather than generic AI-generated prose.
GrammarlyGO is available across the same platforms where Grammarly works: browser extensions, desktop applications, and mobile keyboards. Prompt limits vary by plan.
| Plan | GrammarlyGO prompts per month |
|---|---|
| Free | 100 |
| Pro | 2,000 per member |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
| Education | Configurable by institution |
Grammarly offers several product tiers for individuals, teams, and institutions.
The free tier provides basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrections. It includes 100 GrammarlyGO prompts per month but does not include advanced features like full-sentence rewrites, plagiarism detection, or style guides. The Free plan is available to anyone with an email address and works across all supported platforms.
In 2024, Grammarly merged its former "Premium" and "Business" tiers into a single plan called Grammarly Pro. Pro costs $12 per member per month when billed annually, or $30 per month when billed monthly. It supports teams of up to 149 members.
Pro includes everything in the Free plan, plus:
Enterprise pricing is custom and requires contacting the sales team. Features include an admin console, team analytics, SAML single sign-on (SSO), SCIM provisioning for automated user management, data loss prevention (DLP), unlimited AI prompts, brand tone management, and dedicated customer support. Based on industry pricing data, a 50-seat Enterprise deployment typically costs around $12,500 annually, while a 200-seat deployment runs approximately $47,500 annually, with volume discounts ranging from 5% to 30%.
Grammarly for Education is designed for academic institutions and is used by over 3,000 colleges and universities, including Arizona State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Clemson University. The platform includes writing suggestions with explanations so students can learn from corrections rather than just accepting them blindly. Instructors can focus their feedback on ideas and argumentation rather than surface-level grammar issues.
The Education plan includes an optional generative AI feature for brainstorming and outlining, which administrators can enable or disable at the institutional level. A feature called Grammarly Authorship gives instructors a detailed view of how a student's document was composed, including a full replay showing where external text was inserted, when the student paused, and how the document evolved. Grammarly claims institutions using Authorship have reduced academic integrity violations by up to 96%.
Grammarly for Education also supports six languages for writing assistance (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian) and in-line translation in 19 languages.
| Plan | Price | AI prompts | Plagiarism check | Team features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100/month | No | No |
| Pro (annual) | $12/member/month | 2,000/member/month | Yes | Up to 149 members |
| Pro (monthly) | $30/month | 2,000/member/month | Yes | Up to 149 members |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Yes | Unlimited, with SSO and SCIM |
| Education | Custom | Configurable | Yes | Institution-wide |
Grammarly works across a wide range of platforms and devices. Its primary integrations include:
| Platform type | Supported applications |
|---|---|
| Browser extensions | Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge |
| Desktop applications | Windows native app, macOS native app |
| Mobile | iOS keyboard, Android keyboard |
| Office suites | Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Outlook, Gmail |
| Communication tools | Slack, Microsoft Teams |
| Learning management systems | Blackboard, Canvas |
| API | Grammarly for Developers (custom integrations) |
The Chrome extension alone works across more than 500,000 websites. Organizations can deploy the Chrome extension silently across managed devices using group policy or mobile device management tools, which simplifies rollout for large enterprises.
Grammarly also offers an API through its Grammarly for Developers program, allowing third-party applications to embed Grammarly's writing checks into their own interfaces.
For most of its history, Grammarly only supported English. In September 2025, the company launched grammar and spelling corrections for five additional languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian. Users writing in these languages also get paragraph-level rewrites and in-line translation capabilities.
Grammarly subsequently expanded writing support to cover over 20 languages total, including Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Swedish, Romanian, Indonesian, Slovak, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Korean, Tagalog, and Hindi. When writing in any supported language, users see the same red-underline interface familiar from the English experience. Translation is available in 19 languages directly within the writing interface, removing the need to switch to a separate translation tool.
All multilingual features are included in every plan, including Free.
Grammarly encrypts all data in transit using TLS 1.2 and at rest using AES-256 server-side encryption. The company follows the principle of least privilege for internal data access and regularly audits employee permissions. Grammarly states that it does not sell user data and does not use customer text to train its AI models.
The platform holds the following compliance certifications:
| Certification | Scope |
|---|---|
| SOC 2 (Type 2) | Security, privacy, availability, and confidentiality |
| ISO 27001 / 27002 | Information security management |
| ISO 27018 | Protection of personally identifiable information in the cloud |
| ISO 42001 | Responsible AI development and use |
| HIPAA | Protected health information (requires Business Associate Agreement) |
| GDPR | European Union data privacy |
| CCPA | California consumer privacy |
| PCI DSS | Payment card data security |
Enterprise deployments can be configured with SAML SSO, SCIM user provisioning, and data loss prevention controls. Administrators can set policies governing which AI features are available to their organization's users.
Grammarly has been profitable since shortly after its founding, which is unusual among venture-backed software companies. The company was cash-flow positive before taking any outside investment in 2017.
| Year | Estimated annual revenue | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | ~$50M (estimated) | Series A raised; 7M daily users; already profitable |
| 2019 | ~$100M+ (estimated) | Series B raised; Grammarly Business launched |
| 2021 | ~$350M | Series C at $13B valuation |
| 2022 | ~$500M | Business and enterprise segments growing |
| 2024 | ~$650M ARR | Coda acquisition announced |
| 2025 | ~$700M ARR | $1B non-dilutive financing secured |
Note: Grammarly is a private company and does not publicly report audited financials. The figures above come from investor reports, press releases, and industry estimates from sources like Sacra, Getlatka, and TechCrunch. Different sources sometimes report varying numbers depending on whether they measure recognized revenue, annual recurring revenue (ARR), or annualized run rates.
Grammarly's revenue model is primarily subscription-based. Individual users pay monthly or annual fees for Pro plans, while businesses and educational institutions pay per-seat licenses. The company does not run advertising and does not sell user data.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investors | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | May 2017 | $110M | General Catalyst, IVP, Spark Capital | ~$1B |
| Series B | 2019 | $90M | General Catalyst | $1B+ |
| Series C | November 2021 | $200M | Baillie Gifford, BlackRock | $13B |
| Growth financing | May 2025 | $1B (non-dilutive) | General Catalyst | $13B (preserved) |
Total capital raised exceeds $1.55 billion. The 2025 round was structured as non-dilutive financing through General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, a structure that provides growth capital tied to revenue performance without diluting existing shareholders.
Grammarly reports that 96% of Fortune 500 companies use its products in some capacity. Over 70,000 professional teams rely on the platform, including teams at Atlassian, Databricks, Zoom, Everlane, Siemens, and Upwork. The company claims that its business customers save an average of $5,000 per employee per year in productivity gains from faster, clearer communication.
Grammarly was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2024 in the AI category. The award recognized its integration of generative AI features alongside traditional grammar checking.
Grammarly operates in the AI writing assistant market alongside several competitors. Each tool has a different primary strength.
| Tool | Primary focus | Pricing | Differentiator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grammarly | All-in-one writing assistant | Free; Pro from $12/month | Broadest platform integration, enterprise features |
| ProWritingAid | Deep style and structure analysis | $10/month yearly; $399 lifetime | 25+ specialized writing reports for long-form writers |
| QuillBot | Paraphrasing and rewriting | Free tier; Premium from $4.17/month | Paraphraser with multiple modes; popular with students |
| Hemingway Editor | Readability and conciseness | Free online; $19.99 desktop app | Color-coded readability scoring; focuses on clarity |
| LanguageTool | Open-source grammar checking | Free; Premium $59.90/year | Supports 30+ languages natively |
| Microsoft Editor | Grammar in Microsoft 365 | Included with Microsoft 365 | Bundled with Office apps; large built-in user base |
| ChatGPT | General-purpose AI chatbot | Free; Plus $20/month | Flexible text generation; lacks inline integration |
ProWritingAid is most popular among novelists, bloggers, and long-form content creators who want detailed reports on style, pacing, and structure. QuillBot appeals to students and researchers for its paraphrasing engine, which can rephrase text in multiple modes (fluency, formal, creative, etc.). Hemingway Editor focuses narrowly on readability, using color-coded highlights to flag complex sentences, passive voice, and adverb overuse. LanguageTool, which is open-source, provides strong support for non-English languages, checking grammar in over 30 languages. Microsoft Editor comes free with Microsoft 365 subscriptions, giving it a massive distribution advantage among Office users. ChatGPT and other general-purpose AI models can handle writing tasks but operate as standalone chat interfaces rather than inline assistants that work inside existing applications.
Grammarly's competitive advantage is its cross-platform presence. No other dedicated writing assistant offers the same breadth of integration across browser extensions, desktop apps, mobile keyboards, office suites, communication tools, and developer APIs, combined with enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, analytics, and custom style guides.
| Name | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Shishir Mehrotra | CEO (since January 2025) | Co-founder and former CEO of Coda; previously at YouTube and Microsoft |
| Max Lytvyn | Co-founder | Co-created Grammarly and MyDropBox in Ukraine |
| Alex Shevchenko | Co-founder | Co-created Grammarly and MyDropBox; met Lytvyn at International Christian University in Ukraine |
| Dmytro Lider | Co-founder | Third co-founder; worked at MyDropBox before Grammarly |
| Rahul Roy-Chowdhury | Former CEO (May 2023 to January 2025) | Previously led Chrome and Chrome OS product management at Google |
| Mark Schaaf | Chief Technology Officer (since September 2024) | Hired to lead engineering and technology strategy |
| Navam Welihinda | Chief Financial Officer (since September 2024) | Previously CFO at HashiCorp, where he led the December 2021 IPO |
Grammarly had approximately 1,000 to 1,600 employees as of late 2025, distributed across its offices in San Francisco, Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver. The company employs staff on six continents.
In February 2024, Grammarly laid off 230 employees (82 in the US, around 37 in Ukraine, and the rest across other locations). The company described this as a restructuring to realign roles around AI development rather than a cost-reduction measure. Affected employees received at least three months of base pay, with longer-tenured staff receiving more. US-based employees could continue health insurance for six months. Despite the layoffs, Grammarly continued to hire for AI-focused positions, including AI security researchers, computational linguists, and machine learning engineers.
Grammarly has faced criticism on several fronts. Some users report that the tool occasionally suggests changes that alter the intended meaning of a sentence, particularly with complex, technical, or creative writing where unconventional grammar is intentional. The plagiarism checker, while useful for a quick scan, has been noted as less thorough than dedicated plagiarism detection services like Turnitin, which have access to larger academic databases.
Privacy-conscious users have raised concerns about the browser extension having broad access to text typed across all websites. Grammarly responds by pointing to its compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) and its stated policy of not selling data or using customer text for model training. The company encrypts data in transit and at rest, and follows the principle of least privilege for internal access.
Some writing instructors have argued that heavy reliance on automated grammar tools can weaken a writer's ability to internalize grammar rules independently. Because Grammarly fixes errors automatically, users may accept corrections without understanding the underlying principle, potentially creating a dependency on the tool.
In March 2026, Grammarly discontinued its "Expert review" feature, which had allowed users to submit documents to human proofreaders for a fee. The feature was removed following user complaints about inconsistent quality.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2008 | MyDropBox sold to Blackboard |
| 2009 | Grammarly founded in Kyiv, Ukraine |
| 2015 | Chrome browser extension released; surpassed 1M daily users |
| 2017 | Series A ($110M) from General Catalyst, IVP, Spark Capital; 7M daily users |
| 2019 | Series B ($90M); Grammarly Business launched for teams and organizations |
| 2020 | 30M daily active users reached |
| 2021 | Series C ($200M) at $13B valuation from Baillie Gifford and BlackRock |
| 2023 | GrammarlyGO generative AI launched (April); Rahul Roy-Chowdhury becomes CEO (May) |
| 2024 | 230 employees laid off (February); CTO and CFO hired (September); Coda acquisition announced (December) |
| 2025 | $1B financing from General Catalyst (May); Superhuman acquired (June); multilingual support launched (September); rebranded parent to Superhuman Platform Inc. (October) |