Grammarly Raises $90M To Suggest Best English Words That 'Read The Air' In Text Flow

Pickup: As Comma Complexity Continues, Grammarly Raises $90M

News summary: AI English editing service "Grammerly" announced on the 10th that it has raised $90 million in venture round funding. General Catalyst is the lead investor, and Institutional Venture Partnersm is also participating in the round.

The company was founded in 2009. We provide an automated service for grammar proofreading in English. It is characterized by suggesting context by AI, and also provides extensions for Chrome and Microsoft Office. According to the company's press release, it currently boasts over 20 million DAU users. Introduction by corporations and institutions is also progressing, and there are more than 2,000 introduction results.

Top of the line: Grammerly is 10 years old this year, and this is its second round of funding. In 2017, we raised 110 million dollars, and this time we raised 90 million dollars, so we have successfully raised a total of 200 million dollars.

As a business model of this service, we have adopted a freemium model in which basic functions are free. The paid version offers a more detailed expression check.

The paid version is a subscription type, and plans are available on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. However, I am also a user at a university in the United States, but I do not have a strong impression that light users such as students who are the target of subscription use the paid version. Basically, corporate sales account for most of the sales.

The following is the timeline from the company's founding to the present. You can see that the number of users continues to rise on the right shoulder. In particular, the number of users has increased since the release of the new service "Mobile Keyboard" app that appeared in 2017.

The app is a smartphone keyboard that comes with Grammerly functionality. In addition to correcting grammar, it is characterized by supporting the optimal word selection that "reads the atmosphere" from the flow of the sentence.

The same function is called "Tone Detector", and it is also introduced in the browser version, but since communication in today's society revolves around smartphones, I feel that this product is targeted at such a layer. Together with pictograms like this, it will tell you in an easy-to-understand way how different words with the same meaning will give the other person an impression. It can be said that it is a service that calibrates our communication skills.

Personally, I think it would be even more attractive if Tone Detector introduced a function that recognizes "individuals" and suggests character choices. For example, if a politician fills out their profile on Grammerly, Grammerly will determine that they are an influential person of "high social standing" and will tell them "Your tone is wrong" before posting on Twitter. The future may come.