A popular auto-editing tool for writers, Grammarly, has received $200 million at a $13 billion valuation from new investors, including Baillie Gifford and funds managed by BlackRock. The investment will be used to speed up product development, team expansion, and improve users’ writing with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly’s global head of product, commented, “We believe this funding round is a great validation of our business strength. We’ve been cash-flow positive from the very early days. The round also validates the strength of our mission to improve lives through improving communication. This funding round comes in the context of product innovation and product scaling.”
He continued, “Looking ahead, I see so much potential because, at the end of the day, it always comes back to our mission of improving communication. There’s so much change in how work gets done with remote-first global teams trying to work together. We see a huge opportunity to help people with these changing scenarios communicate more effectively. This new funding is only going to help us accelerate our efforts to do that.”
In terms of Grammarly’s future vision, Roy-Chowdhury says that Grammarly’s focus will no longer be confined to conciseness, consistency, and correctness. The company intends to add new categories within which it will make suggestions for improvements, as well as becoming more ubiquitous.
Since the launch of Grammarly for Mac and Windows earlier this week, Grammarly has already scaled its product offerings and achieved its goal towards ubiquity. In addition to Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, Jira, and more, the new desktop application can be used with several other applications. Roy-Chowdhury says the new desktop app is now able to break free of the technical barriers associated with browser extensions so that it will become the go-to writing tool wherever users type.
