Grammarly

Grammarly was founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider.^[9] The company initially offered a subscription-based product intended to help students improve their grammar and spelling.^[10] That product was subsequently developed into a writing assistant that checks the grammar, spelling, and tone of a piece of writing.^[10][11][12]

By 2015, Grammarly had a million active daily users,^[13] and began offering its flagship product via a freemium model that allowed all users access to the product's basic capabilities while placing more sophisticated features like style recommendations and plagiarism detection behind a paywall.^[14][15] It also launched a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as an add-on for Google Docs.^[15] In 2017, Grammarly raised $110 million in its first funding round.^[16]

In 2019, Grammarly added a tone detector to its writing assistant. This tool uses set rules and machine learning to help users gauge the character of their writing and tailor it to a particular audience.^[17][18] Also in 2019, the company held a second funding round, raising $90 million.^[15] In 2020, Grammarly made its first investment in an outside company, participating in a $10 million funding round for Docugami, a company working on AI-driven document generation.^[19] In 2021, Grammarly raised another $200 million, at a total valuation of $13 billion, via its third funding round.^[20] By then, it had about 30 million users.^[21]

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Grammarly ceased all business operations in Russia and Belarus. The company also announced that it would donate the net revenue it had earned in Russia and Belarus since 2014, about $5 million, to Ukrainian humanitarian groups,^[22][23] paid the salaries of Ukrainians who left their jobs at Grammarly to join the nation's army,^[24] and made its product free for Ukrainian journalists publishing news about the war in English.^[22]

In April 2023, Grammarly launched a product using generative AI built on the GPT-3 large language models.^[25] The software can generate and rewrite content based on prompts.^[26] It can also generate topic ideas and outlines for written content such as blog posts and academic essays.^[27] It has been trained on an anonymized library of business writing and can suggest clarifying edits and additions to work communications such as emails and chat messages.^[28] In September 2024, Grammarly announced the release of its Authorship tool, which attempts to identify the source of a passage of text. It then designates the passage as written by the text's author, lifted from another source, or generated by AI.^[29][30] It is not clear to what extent such tools work.^[31][32]

In July 2024, Grammarly donated approximately $500,000 to help rebuild Okhmatdyt children's hospital after it was damaged by a Russian missile strike.^[33][34]

In December 2024, Grammarly announced that it was acquiring the productivity startup Coda.^[35] As part of the deal, Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra replaced Rahul Roy-Chowdhury as Grammarly's CEO.^[7]

2025 saw major changes in Grammarly's funding, leadership, and product. In May, Grammarly announced it raised $1 billion in nondilutive funding from General Catalyst.^[36] In July, Grammarly announced that it was acquiring the email client Superhuman.^[8] In October, Grammarly's parent company, Grammarly Inc., announced a rebrand to the Superhuman brand and introduced a new AI-powered assistant designed to expand beyond writing correction into broader productivity and communication support.^[37]

In March 2026, Grammarly faced complaints and criticism in response to an AI-powered feature called "Expert Review", which offered writing advice from simulations of actual living and deceased authors without contacting them or getting their permission.^[38][39][40] Launched in August 2025 as part of a suite of AI-powered features, the tool's featured authors included Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and bell hooks.^[38][41][42] On March 11, 2026, the same day that journalist Julia Angwin filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the company, Superhuman announced that it was discontinuing the feature.^[5][42][43] In response to the lawsuit, CEO Mehrotra wrote, "We have reviewed the lawsuit, and we believe the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them."^[44]

In early 2018, Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google who was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team,^[45] discovered a severe vulnerability in Grammarly's browser extension that exposed authentication tokens to websites and could allow them to access the users' documents and other data.^[46] A few hours later, the company released a hotfix and reported that it found no evidence of compromised user data.^[47] This vulnerability was registered as CVE-2018-6654 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database.^[48] In December 2018, Grammarly launched a bug bounty program on HackerOne, offering a $100,000 reward to the first white hat hacker to access a specific document on the company's server.^[49]

Reviewers have praised Grammarly's ease of use and helpful suggestions, finding it worthwhile despite its relatively high price and lack of offline functionality.^[50] Conversely, some users have criticized Grammarly for incorrect suggestions, ignorance of tone and context, and reduction of writers' freedom of expression.^[51][52]

Documents that Grammarly has corrected have occasionally been accused by detection engines such as Turnitin of being partially or entirely AI-generated.^[53] Schools are struggling to develop consistent and fair rules for its use, with some teachers recommending Grammarly to their students and others rejecting it.^[54][55]

Superhuman Platform Inc. (formerly Grammarly Inc.), the privately held company^[56] that develops Grammarly, is headquartered in San Francisco.^[57] It also has offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver.^[58] Superhuman Inc. is led by Shishir Mehrotra, who became the company's CEO in 2024.^[7] Grammarly Inc. became Superhuman Platform Inc. on October 29, 2025.^[59]

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