Grammarly is raising $ 200 million at a $ 13 billion valuation to use AI to make you an even better writer – TechCrunch

Grammarly, the popular auto-editing tool for writing, raised $ 200 million on a valuation of $ 13 billion from new investors like Baillie Gifford and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, among others. The company plans to use the investment to accelerate product innovation and team growth.

“We believe this funding round is a great confirmation of our business strength,” Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly’s global product director, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We had positive cash flow from the start. The round also affirms the strength of our mission to improve life through improved communication. This funding round is related to product innovation and product scaling. “

According to Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly plans to use the funding to continue investing in its AI technology. The company will also continue to develop its natural language processing and machine learning technology to deliver personalized communication feedback to its users. Roy-Chowdhury also noted that Grammarly plans additional investments to gain and build user trust.

“Looking to the future, I see so much potential because in the end it always goes back to our mission to improve communication. There are so many changes in the way work is done with remote-first-global teams trying to work together. We see a great opportunity to help people with these changing scenarios communicate more effectively. This new funding will only help us accelerate our efforts, ”he said.

As for the company’s vision for the future of the service, Roy-Chowdhury noted that Grammarly will go beyond just focusing on conciseness, consistency, and correctness. The company plans to add new categories to offer suggestions for improvement while working to become more ubiquitous.

Grammarly is already scaling its product offering and achieving its ubiquity goal with the launch of Grammarly for Mac and Windows earlier this week. The new desktop application can be used on apps like Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, Jira and more. Roy-Chowdhury says the new desktop app aims to be users’ writing tool everywhere they type, as the service is now able to break through technical barriers associated with browser extensions.

“With Grammarly for Mac and Windows, we can now bring it all together and help you with your entire flow of communication. This means that we are present wherever you communicate and can help you achieve your results more effectively, ”says Roy-Chowdhury.

Grammarly also recently announced the launch of Grammarly for Developers with the launch of its Text Editor SDK (Software Development Kit), which allows programmers to embed Grammarly’s text editing capabilities into any web application. The beta version of this SDK gives developers access to the full power of Grammarly’s automated editing with just a few lines of code. Although users of the Target Application do not need to be Grammarly customers, they can log into their Grammarly accounts and access all of its related functionality.

The company’s most recent round of funding follows Grammarly’s previous one in October 2019 when the company raised $ 90 million on a valuation of over $ 1 billion. That round was led by General Catalyst, who in May 2017 also spearheaded the only other $ 110 million round that former investor IVP and other unnamed funders had participated in.

Today Grammarly works with more than 500,000 applications and websites, including email clients, business software, and word processors. The company says that as more people connect through more online platforms, it’s important to get communications right to meet individual and business goals.

“As the world goes digital, people are communicating more than ever – and yet it has never been so difficult, “said Peter Singlehurst, director of private companies at Baillie Gifford, in a statement. “Grammarly is one of the few companies in the world that is focused on solving this problem. What attracted us is the company’s vision and the team’s ability to advance the product to help more people communicate better in more situations. Grammarly’s long-term and ambitious approach also fits in with our investment approach. “

Grammarly operates on a freemium model, with paid levels providing users with more tools than grammar and spell checkers to include things like word choice, sentence paraphrases, tone adjustments, fluency, level of formality, and plagiarism detection. The paid tiers are $ 12, $ 20, and $ 30 per month.