Grammarly, long known as the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered writing assistant that catches typos in your emails, is rebranding to Superhuman as part of a transformation into an all-in-one productivity platform.
The rebrand comes with four products under the Superhuman suite of tools, including the Grammarly writing assistant, the Mail inbox service, the Coda collaborative workspace platform, and a platform of AI agents called Superhuman Go. The company claimed the unified suite “understands” a user’s work context by accessing and synthesizing data across the platforms.
“When we started Grammarly, we knew that technology is going to keep changing.”
Superhuman originally built software to detect spelling and grammar errors, and now has evolved into an AI writing assistant, providing suggestions on style, form, and tone, as well as coordinating tasks across email, calendars, and document management.
Luke Behnke, Superhuman vice president of enterprise product, told BetaKit in an interview that the rebrand had been in the works for a while but went “full speed ahead” in January when Grammarly acquired AI productivity platform Coda. Grammarly hired Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra as its chief executive, then acquired AI email management app Superhuman later in the summer.
“That name just felt like the right match for how we see humans and AI working together in the future,” Behnke said.
All three of Grammarly’s co-founders have Canadian ties or live in Canada. The Bay Area company, which employs roughly 1,500 people according to its LinkedIn, also expanded to Vancouver in 2019 to tap into the city’s well of tech talent.
Max Lytvyn, Dmytro Lider, and Alex Shevchenko founded Grammarly in 2009 in their home country of Ukraine, eventually moving to North America. Lytvyn and Lider both live in Vancouver, while Shevchenko earned his master of business administration at the University of Toronto. Lytvyn has also been active politically in Canada, signing an open letter in February alongside other business leaders calling for the immediate recall of Parliament after it was prorogued.
With 40 million active weekly users, including enterprise clients Databricks and Zoom, the San Francisco-based company was last valued at $13 billion USD in 2021 and brings in $700 million in annual revenue. Grammarly raised $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund for sales, marketing, and “strategic acquisitions.”
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Under the rebrand, the freemium Grammarly model will still be available to casual users, Behnke said, for spelling and grammar checks. Meanwhile, paid individual users will now get the whole Superhuman AI suite for the same annual price as the single Grammarly tool.
The enterprise utility of AI tools has become a contested topic as tech companies increasingly introduce AI into their workflows and set expectations for employees to use the technology. Prominent Canadian companies Shopify and OpenText this year released internal mandates for employees AI use and now factor it into performance reviews.
While many companies have banked on productivity gains, this hasn’t been the case across the board, particularly with AI pilot projects. Behnke acknowledged that failed proof-of-concepts are a real issue he’s heard from Grammarly’s business customers, particularly when employees aren’t using the product. “It’s a burden of AI vendors to prove return on investment,” he said.
In Canada, companies are adopting AI tools at a slower rate than their global peers, despite industry and governmental pressure to integrate the tech, according to data from venture firm Georgian Partners. At Grammarly, Behnke claimed that internal AB testing of one client pilot resulted in a 16-percent improvement of that company’s customer satisfaction rates.
Lytvyn, who is the company’s head of revenue, said at Web Summit Vancouver that Grammarly started out knowing that its technology would evolve to fit the problem it was solving.
“When we started Grammarly, we knew that technology is going to keep changing,” Lytvyn said. “When we started it was impossible to do what we wanted to do. Our mission and vision were not possible to accomplish at the time when we started the company, and we knew that. We were counting on technology progressing.”
Feature image courtesy Web Summit Vancouver.