Grammarly, the popular writing correction platform that has literally become a writer-household name, is getting even bigger. The San Fransisco, California-based upstart has reached a valuation of $13 billion after raising $200 million in fresh funds from Baillie Gifford, General Catalyst, Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and other investors.
This comes after its funding round in 2019, following which it was valued at more than $1 billion, and its partnership with Samsung Electronics, which will see Grammarly’s writing suggestions be integrated with Samsung’s smartphone keyboard.
The proceeds from the funding round will be utilized towards accelerating product innovation, team growth, and investing in AI technology, and advancing its natural language processing and ML technology in order to provide personalized communication feedback.
Founded in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider, and Max Lytvyn, Grammarly began its journey as Sentenceworks. Today, it utilizes AI technology to provide a writing assistant and an auto-editing tool in order to help improve people’s writing and offer other services such as checking spellings, grammar, tone of language and context.
It has been growing steadily over the past few years, owing to its success with its freemium business model in 2015. Its users and customers include big names such as Zoom, Cisco Systems Inc, Dell Technologies Inc and Expedia Group Inc. Today, its services are currently used by nearly 30 million people every day, and it works across more than 500,000 applications and websites including email clients, enterprise software, and word processors.
Should you wish for more services such as recommendations and detecting plagiarism, you can upgrade it to the paid version. It also has a desktop application for Windows and Mac operating systems, which can be used on apps such as Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, Jira, and more. In the future, Grammarly may venture into new categories in which to offer suggested improvements, while also working to become more ubiquitous.
“With Grammarly for Mac and Windows, we can now tie everything together and help you with the entirety of your communication flow. With this, we are present everywhere you communicate and can help you achieve your outcomes more effectively,” said Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly global head of product.
