Grammarly

Grammarly, which renamed its parent company Superhuman in October 2025, makes the Grammarly AI writing assistant used in browsers, desktop apps and office software, and now also sells the Coda document suite, Superhuman Mail and the Superhuman Go assistant. Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn and Dmytro Lider founded it in Ukraine in 2009. It is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Kyiv, New York and Vancouver. Shishir Mehrotra, Coda's co-founder, has been chief executive since December 2024.

Grammarly grew for eight years without venture money. Its first round, $110 million in May 2017, came from General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital; CEO Brad Hoover had earlier been on General Catalyst's investment team. In October 2019 General Catalyst led a $90 million round at a valuation above $1 billion, with IVP participating, for $200 million raised in total. In November 2021 the company raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation from new investors including Baillie Gifford and funds managed by BlackRock. In May 2025 General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund committed $1 billion of nondilutive capital, repaid with a capped share of the revenue it generates.

The company is private. It bought Coda in December 2024, Superhuman in July 2025, GPTZero in June 2026 and the meeting notetaker Fathom in September 2026. It had 6.9 million daily active users in 2017 and 40 million active users by late 2024, and annual revenue above $700 million was reported in 2025. Grammarly said it had been cash flow positive from its early days. TechCrunch reported in 2025 that an investor considered the current valuation significantly lower than the 2021 price, which is one reason the company chose nondilutive capital over a new priced round.

Grammarly is an example of investors entering a profitable, bootstrapped company late rather than funding it from the start. General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital invested eight years after founding, when the product already had millions of daily users and was profitable, and the 2021 round turned the founders into billionaires on paper. General Catalyst has since backed the company three times, through two equity rounds and the revenue based commitment. The $1 billion revenue based facility in 2025 let the company fund growth and acquisitions without setting a new equity price below the 2021 mark. More than 16 years after founding, early investors still have no liquidity from a sale or listing.