Grammarly raised $200 million in the latest funding round
Grammarly raised fresh capital at a valuation of $13 billion, highlighting sky-high demand for technology tools that provide writing assistance. Notably, a start-up from San Francisco raised $200 million in the latest funding round from investors led by Baillie Gifford.
The latest funding round showed that investors are willing to pay a premium for a specific type of productivity software. They are ready to pay despite the dominance of cash-rich companies such as Google and Microsoft in the market.
Another start-up, Notion, whose software enables people to create collaborative documents, raised money at a $10 billion valuation.
In its previous funding round two years ago, Grammarly saw a value of more than $1 billion. Based on the information provided by the company, roughly 30 million people are using its services every day. The history of Grammarly dates back to 2009. Max Lytvyn, Dmytro Lider, and Alex Shevchenko created this start-up. At the moment, it has employees in San Francisco, Vancouver, and the Ukrainian city of Kyiv.
Grammarly and business model
Over the year, it launched numerous products, including Grammarly Business. Its free service identifies misspellings, grammatical mistakes as well as unnecessary words. Grammarly’s paid version offers additional types of recommendations and detects plagiarism. Furthermore, business and enterprise tiers help workers stay compliant with style guides and a common brand voice. Grammarly’s customer list is quite impressive: Dell Technologies Inc, Expedia Group, Cisco Systems Inc, and others.
The start-up also has a desktop application for Microsoft Corp’s Windows and Apple’s Mac operating systems.
Google Docs and Microsoft Word can indeed do some of what Grammarly can do. Moreover, services such as Turnitin can find instances of plagiarism. Still, the company does not have a single direct competitor. It performs benchmarks to see how it’s performing on grammatical feedback compared to competitors. Grammarly is still focused on English, and it has no intention to change the status quo. In the meantime, Microsoft’s Editor feature for browser extensions and Office applications supports more than 20 languages.
Grammarly recently reached an agreement with Samsung Electronics. As part of the deal, its writing suggestions will be integrated with the South Korean company’s smartphone keyboard. Thanks to an agreement with Grammarly, Samsung’s customers will be able to use Grammarly’s tools without installing an app.
