California-based Grammarly, a digital writing assistant that helps people communicate clearly and effectively, announced that it has raised over $200M (approx €176.5M) in a fresh round of funding.
The investment came from new investors including Baillie Gifford, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock among others.
“To improve lives by improving communication”
Founded in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider, and Max Lytvyn, Grammarly has focused on a singular mission: improving lives by improving communication. The company works to empower users whenever and wherever they communicate, building a product that scales across platforms and devices.
Grammarly claims to have supported 30 million people and 30,000 teams write more clearly and effectively every day, while delivering over 100 billion writing suggestions to its users each month.
The company applies “best-in-class” Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) methods and continuously fine-tunes them to deliver precise and explainable communication feedback. The platform’s real-time suggestions offer contextual grammatical error correction, ensure consistency, encourage inclusive language practices, promote conciseness, and more.
Brad Hoover, CEO of Grammarly, says in a blog post, “We’ve always believed the ability to communicate effectively should not be dependent on which application or operating system you choose, so we’ve invested in making our service available across more than 500,000 applications and websites, through various product offerings, such as our browser extensions and mobile keyboards.”
The company offers its services across various types of communications be it a social media post or an essay for school, in emails, proposals, reports, presentations, texts (SMS), and more.
Hoover says, “Grammarly will also continue to advance our NLP and ML technology to deliver personalised communication feedback tailored to users around the world. As we delve further beyond syntax to semantics—with features like full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, and fluency feedback—we’ll deliver even higher-quality communication suggestions across more stages of the communication process.”
Capital utilisation
With this funding, the company looks to expand its reach through partnerships. It has already partnered with Samsung to bring advanced writing assistance to millions of Samsung mobile users worldwide. Grammarly also released its new desktop application this week across two operating systems: Grammarly for Windows and Grammarly for Mac.
In addition, the platform is further planning to invest in “Grammarly for Developers”. Max Lytvyn says, “Quality communication translates to improvements in engagement, retention, and other key metrics. And we’ve made it easier than ever for developers to enable improved outcomes for their end-users.”
The product will enable developers to incorporate Grammarly’s writing assistance directly into their applications with just a few lines of code. It will be released in the coming months and will further help the company to bring in more partners.
How Grammarly is helping businesses
Based on a recent Harris Poll/Grammarly data, 87 per cent of business leaders say that their team will not meet business goals without effective communication. Grammarly Business helps its clients to communicate with empathy and accuracy, accelerate their workflows, and ensure consistency across all brand communication.
In just the past year, the number of Grammarly Business customers with large-dollar contracts increased by more than 250 per cent. According to the data, teams at brands such as Zoom, Cisco, and Expedia are accelerating productivity and engagement, with an average 20 per cent efficiency increase and 30 per cent improvement in customer satisfaction scores.
In terms of security, Hoover says, “We’ve doubled down on our investments in security so our customers can rest assured their data is safe and secure. We’ve achieved new enterprise-grade security milestones, including a SOC 2 (Type 2) report, ISO 27001/17/18 certifications, and HIPAA compliance. But while some things evolve, others remain consistent. We’re a profitable company that has been cash-flow positive since our very early days, and our business model puts our users first—because we make money from subscriptions, not from selling data or ads.”
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