Who owns grammarly

Further reading. Documentaries, videos and podcasts. Venture round. Timeline November October 10, Grammarly was founded by Alex Shevchenko. Funding rounds Save to List. Powered by Golden Research Engine. Aldin Barrett. Angela Ritter. Anton Verinov. Ayan Mandal. Brad Hoover. Celeste Mora. Chris Farmer. David Rowan. Elena Tsyvyan. Ellie Lupo. Gautam Gupta. Geoff Donaker. Igor Gromov. Jasper Posner. Jillian Lurie. Joshua Reeves.

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The company brings together not just a vast trove of data about proper grammar, but using AI techniques around machine learning and natural language processing it is constantly synthesizing new words and phrases and styles to improve the help that it provides to users, to solve what is essentially an everyday problem for many people: writing well.

For Grammarly, helping people communicate more effectively is their sole goal. On a superficial level, at least, the answer was obvious: because effective written communication is hard work. Which led the entrepreneurs to ask themselves another question: Instead of detecting purloined words, why not help people who want to write better?

Max Lytvyn [Photo: courtesy of Grammarly] The notion of using a computer to check grammar was not new. Old-time wordsmiths will recall Grammatik , a utility that debuted in the s and was folded into WordPerfect in the s. And advances in AI meant that they could analyze text with a new level of sophistication. Though based in Kiev, the service was about English grammar from the start; to this day, the company has no plans to launch in additional languages. Lytvyn says that the fact its creators learned English as a second language was an asset.

Then they emphasized the student audience even more with a new name, EssayRater. Another landmark moment happened later that year when Lytvyn received a call from Hoover, who had spent six years as a venture capitalist for Bay Area-based General Catalyst. The three bonded, and Hoover came on board as a consultant. Lider stayed in Kiev ; all three founders are still with the company, which now has staffers in Kiev, 70 in San Francisco, and a handful in New York.

Instead, it continued to bootstrap itself, offering a paid service rather than pursuing user growth first and figuring out monetization later. From on, it was cash-flow positive.

Grammarly started with the most basic of interfaces: You pasted your text into a browser-based window, then pressed a button to check it. Over the years, the company has brought its tools to most of the places people sling words, with browser extensions, Microsoft Office and Google Docs add-ins, and keyboard apps for iOS and Android. Along the way, Grammarly transcended its academic origins, finding a growing market in users who applied it to personal and professional writings.

Indeed, companies were eager to adopt Grammarly before the company was quite ready for them. So for several years, the company mulled over the idea of introducing a free version. The move had its risks: Grammarly already had plenty of paying users, some of whom might have opted to downgrade to free accounts. In early , Grammarly finally went freemium, introducing a free version with a subset of the plus language checks currently available in the paid incarnation.

As it hoped, giving all comers a taste of the service for free resulted in more people choosing to pay for the fuller experience.