Main Highlights:
- Grammarly announced a $200 million funding round and is now valued at $13 billion post-funding.
- Grammarly Premium, the company’s entry-level English-only service, costs $30 per month (or $144 annually), while Grammarly Business costs $25 per user per month.
- Grammarly recently announced Grammarly for Developers, a development kit that allows firms to add Grammarly-powered recommendations to existing web-based apps.
- With the newest fundraising round, the company has raised almost $400 million.
Grammarly, the famous auto-editing and writing program, has raised $200 million in investment at a $13 billion value from new investors, including Baillie Gifford and BlackRock funds and accounts. The funds will be utilized to advance product development and team expansion.
Grammarly’s global head of product, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, told in an interview that they believe this fundraising round is a strong endorsement of their business. They have been cash flow positive since their inception. Additionally, the game validates the mission’s strength to enhance lives through improved communication. This fundraising round is aimed at product innovation and scaling.
Grammarly intends to utilize the funds to continue investing in its artificial intelligence technologies, according to Roy-Chowdhury. Furthermore, the organization will continue to improve its natural language processing and machine learning technologies to provide users with individualized communication feedback. Further, Roy-Chowdhury stated that Grammarly intends to increase its investment to acquire and strengthen customer trust.
Continuing, he stated that He sees tremendous promise in the future since it all comes back to their purpose of increasing communication. There has been a sea change in how work is done due to remote-first global teams attempting to collaborate. The group sees a significant opportunity to assist people in communicating more successfully in these changing settings. This additional financing will only serve to expedite their efforts in that direction.
In terms of the company’s future goal for the service, Roy-Chowdhury stated that Grammarly would evolve beyond emphasizing conciseness, consistency, and correctness. The firm intends to expand the categories in which users can recommend changes while simultaneously expanding its reach.
With the debut of Grammarly for Mac and Windows earlier this week, Grammarly is already expanding its product options and reaching its objective of ubiquity. The new desktop application is compatible with Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, and Jira. According to Roy-Chowdhury, the new desktop software intends to be customers’ go-to writing tool regardless of where they type. The service can now overcome technical limitations connected with browser extensions.
According to Roy-Chowdhury, the team can now connect everything and assist customers with the complete communication route with Grammarly for Mac and Windows. As a result, the Grammarly team is there wherever you communicate and can assist you in accomplishing your goals more successfully.
Grammarly also announced the introduction of Grammarly for Developers with the release of its Text Editor SDK, which enables programmers to embed Grammarly text editing features into any web application. The beta release of this SDK allows for developers to leverage all of Grammarly’s automatic editing capabilities with just a few lines of code. Although users of the target application do not need to be Grammarly customers, if they are, they may connect to their Grammarly accounts and take advantage of all of the associated capabilities.
Grammarly’s Funding Round
Grammarly’s newest investment round follows one in October 2019, when the business raised $90 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. General Catalyst led this investment, which followed its previous round of $110 million in May 2017 with participation from former investor IVP and additional unknown backers.
Grammarly is now integrated into over 500,000 applications and websites, including email clients, enterprise software, and word editors. According to the company, as more people communicate across more online platforms, it’s critical to get communication rights to fulfill personal and business goals. It hopes to assist its customers.
According to Peter Singlehurst, head of private enterprises at Baillie Gifford, as the world has digitized, individuals communicate more than ever before – yet it has never been more challenging. He continued by noting that Grammarly is one of the few businesses dedicated to resolving this issue globally.
What drew them in was the company’s ambition and the team’s capacity to advance the product to improve communication for more people in more scenarios. Grammarly’s long-term and ambitious approach is also consistent with its investment philosophy.
Grammarly runs on a freemium model, with subscription tiers adding features such as word choice, sentence rewrites, tone modifications, fluency, formality level, and plagiarism detection. The paid stories are $12, $20, and $30 per month, respectively.