Grammarly

Grammarly
Original authorsAlex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider[1][2]
DeveloperSuperhuman Platform Inc.
Initial releaseJuly 1, 2009 (2009-07-01)[3]
Operating systemWindows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, various web browsers
Available in
TypeOnline text editor, browser extension, and mobile app with grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detector
LicenseProprietary software
Websitegrammarly.com

Grammarly is an American English-language writing assistant software tool. It started as a tool to review the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing and to identify possible instances of plagiarism. Since 2025 it has integrated extensive generative AI tools, including options to generate essays from scratch, to suggest and insert citations, to "humanize" the text to avoid it being flagged as AI-generated, and to predict grades based on user input on the instructor, course, and university.[4] It can also make stylistic and tonal recommendations. Grammarly's "Expert review" feature was discontinued in March 2026 due to criticism and complaints.[5][6]

Grammarly was developed in Ukraine and launched in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider. In 2024 Grammarly bought Coda, and Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra became Grammarly's CEO.[7] After buying Superhuman in 2025, Grammarly rebranded its parent company as Superhuman and integrated more generative AI tools in the product.[8] Grammarly is now developed by Superhuman Platform Inc., which is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver. It is available as a standalone application; a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox; and as an add-on for Google Docs.

History

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]

Vulnerabilities

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]

Reception

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.

Superhuman Platform Inc.
FormerlyGrammarly Inc.
IndustrySoftware, Artificial intelligence
Founded2009[13]
FoundersAlex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider[13]
HeadquartersSan Francisco, CA[22]
Key people
Shishir Mehrotra (CEO)[7]

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]

See also

References

  1. ^ Krasnikov, Denys (July 6, 2018). "Grammarly opens new Kyiv office as demand rises for help with English". Kyiv Post. Businessgroup LLC. Archived from the original on August 28, 2018. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
  2. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (September 12, 2018). "Grammarly brings its AI-powered proofreading tools to Google Docs". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on September 9, 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
  3. ^ "Grammarly.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
  4. ^ "Grammarly for Students | Grammarly". www.grammarly.com. Archived from the original on March 8, 2026. Retrieved March 12, 2026.
  5. ^ a b Klee, Miles. "Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI 'Expert Review' Feature". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved March 12, 2026.
  6. ^ Nelson, Decrypt / Jason (March 11, 2026). "Grammarly Disables AI 'Expert Review' After Backlash From Authors and Journalists". Decrypt. Retrieved March 12, 2026.
  7. ^ a b c d Malik, Aisha (December 17, 2024). "Grammarly acquires productivity startup Coda, brings on new CEO". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 24, 2025.
  8. ^ a b "Grammarly to Acquire Superhuman to Accelerate Its AI Productivity Platform". Grammarly to Acquire Superhuman | Grammarly Blog. July 1, 2025. Retrieved July 2, 2025.
  9. ^ "Grammarly brings its AI-powered proofreading tools to Google Docs". VentureBeat. September 12, 2018. Archived from the original on May 16, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2021.
  10. ^ a b McEvoy, Jemima (November 23, 2021). "Grammarly Founders Become Billionaires From Fixing Your Sloppy Writing". Forbes. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  11. ^ McCracken, Harry (April 1, 2019). "On its 10th anniversary, Grammarly looks way beyond grammar". Fast Company. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  12. ^ Sullivan, Mark (March 19, 2024). "How Grammarly's AI is writing the new rules of writing". Fast Company. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  13. ^ a b c Krasnikov, Denys (July 6, 2018). "Grammarly opens new Kyiv office as demand rises for help with English". Kyiv Post. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  14. ^ "Two of Grammarly's founders now billionaires with net worth of $4 bn each". Business Today. February 9, 2022. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  15. ^ a b c Wiggers, Kyle (October 10, 2019). "Grammarly raises $90 million for AI that spots grammar errors and plagiarism". VentureBeat. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  16. ^ Roof, Katie (May 8, 2017). "Grammarly raises $110 million for a better spell check". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  17. ^ Lardinois, Frederic (September 24, 2019). "Grammarly gets a tone detectorto keep you out of email trouble". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  18. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (September 24, 2019). "Grammarly uses AI to detect the tone and tenor of your writing". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  19. ^ Bishop, Todd (May 13, 2020). "Grammarly makes first investment, taking stake in Seattle document engineering startup Docugami". GeekWire. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  20. ^ Podder, Sohini (November 17, 2021). "Grammarly raises fresh funds at $13 billion valuation". Reuters. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  21. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (November 17, 2021). "Grammarly raises $200M to expand its AI-powered writing suggestions platform". VentureBeat. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  22. ^ a b c Lila MacLellan (March 4, 2022). "Ukrainian-founded Grammarly is donating all the money it made in Russia since 2014". Quartz. Archived from the original on February 13, 2023. Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  23. ^ Renbarger, Madeline. "'We feel frustrated': Startup CEOs with teams in Ukraine struggle to help their employees in any way they can". Business Insider. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
  24. ^ Anand, Priya (March 21, 2022). "Grammarly Continues to Pay Staffers Who Joined Ukrainian Army". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  25. ^ Hamish Hector (March 9, 2023). "Grammarly's ChatGPT upgrade won't just improve your writing, it'll do it for you". TechRadar. Archived from the original on May 7, 2023. Retrieved May 7, 2023.
  26. ^ Akuchie, Michael (March 16, 2023). "GrammarlyGo: Everything You Need To Know About The AI Writing Assistant". ScreenRant. Archived from the original on May 7, 2023. Retrieved May 7, 2023.
  27. ^ Chedraoui, Katelyni (June 11, 2024). "Did Apple Intelligence's 'Rewrite' Tool Just Kill Grammarly?". CNET. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  28. ^ Melendez, Steven (March 26, 2024). "Grammarly's AI can now offer suggestions to make your work messages clearer". Reuters. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  29. ^ Whitney, Lance (August 15, 2024). "Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here's how it works". ZDNet. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  30. ^ Contreras, Brian (August 14, 2024). "This New Grammarly Tool Aims to Tell If AI Wrote a Document". Inc. Magazine. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  31. ^ Coffey, Lauren. "Professors Cautious of Tools to Detect AI-Generated Writing". Inside Higher Ed.
  32. ^ Fowler, Geoffrey A. (April 3, 2023). "We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student". The Washington Post.
  33. ^ Lytovchenko, Viktoria (July 10, 2024). "UAH 300 million was raised for "Okhmatdyt" hospital's reconstruction". Online.UA. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  34. ^ "In less than two days: UAH 300 million raised to rebuild Okhmatdyt". Ukraine Frontlines. July 10, 2024. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  35. ^ Primack, Dan (December 18, 2024). "Grammarly is buying Coda to expand AI offerings". Axios. Retrieved February 24, 2025.
  36. ^ Temkin, Marina (May 30, 2025). "Grammarly secures $1B in nondilutive funding from General Catalyst". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  37. ^ Mehta, Ivan (October 29, 2025). "Grammarly rebrands to 'Superhuman,' launches a new AI assistant". TechCrunch. Retrieved October 29, 2025.
  38. ^ a b Klee, Miles (March 4, 2026). "Grammarly Is Offering 'Expert' AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive". Wired. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  39. ^ Bonifield, Stevie (March 6, 2026). "Grammarly is using our identities without permission". The Verge. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  40. ^ Hollister, Sean (March 10, 2026). "Grammarly will keep using authors' identities without permission unless they opt out". The Verge. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  41. ^ Ha, Anthony (March 7, 2026). "Grammarly's 'expert review' is just missing the actual experts". TechCrunch. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  42. ^ a b Julia Angwin (March 13, 2026). "Why I'm Suing Grammarly". The New York Times. Retrieved March 15, 2026.
  43. ^ "Angwin v. Superhuman Platform, Inc. (1:26-cv-02005)". CourtListener. March 11, 2026. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
  44. ^ Tiffany, Kaitlyn (March 12, 2026). "What Was Grammarly Thinking?". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 15, 2026.
  45. ^ Greenberg, Andy (July 15, 2014). "Meet 'Project Zero,' Google's Secret Team of Bug-Hunting Hackers". Wired.com. Archived from the original on January 5, 2015. Retrieved January 4, 2015.
  46. ^ Ormandy, Tavis (February 2, 2018). "Issue 1527: Grammarly: auth tokens are accessible to all websites". project-zero. Google. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  47. ^ Couts, Andrew (February 5, 2018). "Grammarly Bug Let Snoops Read What You Wrote, Typos and All (Updated)". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on January 13, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  48. ^ "CVE-2018-6654". Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Mitre. Archived from the original on July 22, 2024. Retrieved February 15, 2025.
  49. ^ "Grammarly - Bug Bounty Program". HackerOne. March 2022. Archived from the original on March 15, 2023. Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  50. ^ Moore, Ben (July 6, 2020). "Grammarly Review: A slick writing assistant for all your documents". PCMag. Archived from the original on April 10, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2021.
  51. ^ Mayne, Dorothy (January 26, 2021). "Revisiting Grammarly: An Imperfect Tool for Final Editing". another word. Retrieved February 19, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  52. ^ Brogan, Jacob (February 7, 2018). "Grammarly Fixed a Security Vulnerability, but It Still Can't Fix Our Writing". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on December 15, 2022. Retrieved December 29, 2021.
  53. ^ Young, Jeffrey R. (April 4, 2024). "What happened after this college student's paper was falsely flagged for AI use after using Grammarly". Fast Company. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
  54. ^ Menezes, Damita (March 4, 2024). "Student fights academic probation for using Grammarly". The Hill. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
  55. ^ Tang, William. "She used Grammarly to proofread her paper. Now she's accused of 'unintentionally cheating.'". USA TODAY. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
  56. ^ Waddell, Kaveh; Fischer, Sara (October 10, 2019). "Grammarly raises $90 million and says it's now a "unicorn"". Axios. Retrieved December 9, 2024.
  57. ^ Li, Diana (May 17, 2024). "Grammarly Wants to Expand Its AI From the Classroom to the Office". Bloomberg. Retrieved December 2, 2024. Grammarly Inc., a software company known for its writing assistant, is expanding its artificial intelligence offerings in the workplace... The move is part of San Francisco-based Grammarly's effort to ride the generative AI wave and pivot from a grammar-and-spelling checker to a corporate communications and workflow tool.
  58. ^ "AI-powered writing assistant Grammarly opens new office in downtown Vancouver | Venture". dailyhive.com. Archived from the original on September 14, 2019. Retrieved November 19, 2019.
  59. ^ "Becoming Superhuman". Superhuman Blog. October 29, 2025. Retrieved November 2, 2025.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.