Grammarly

Last updated

Grammarly
Original author(s) Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider [1] [2]
Developer(s) Grammarly Inc.
Initial releaseJuly 1, 2009;15 years ago (2009-07-01) [3]
Operating system Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, various web browsers
Available in
Type Online text editor, browser extension, and mobile app with grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detector
License Proprietary software
Website grammarly.com

Grammarly is an English language writing assistant software tool. It reviews the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing as well as identifying possible instances of plagiarism. It can also suggest style and tonal recommendations to users and produce writing from prompts with its generative AI capabilities.

Contents

Grammarly was developed in Ukraine and launched in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko  [ uk ], Max Lytvyn  [ uk ], and Dmytro Lider. It is available as a standalone application; a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox; and as an add-on for Google Docs.

Grammarly is developed by Grammarly Inc., which is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver.

History

Grammarly was founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider. [4] The company initially offered a subscription-based product intended to help students improve their grammar and spelling. [5] That product was subsequently developed into a writing assistant that checks the grammar, spelling, and tone of a piece of writing. [5] [6] [7]

By 2015, Grammarly had one million active daily users. [8] That same year, it began offering its flagship product via a freemium model that allowed all users access to the product's basic capabilities while placing more sophisticated features like style recommendations and plagiarism detection behind a paywall. [9] [10] It also launched a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as an add-on for Google Docs. [10]

In 2017, Grammarly raised $110 million in its first funding round. [11]

In 2019, Grammarly added a tone detector to its writing assistant. This tool uses set rules and machine-learning to help users gauge the character of their writing and tailor it to a particular audience. [12] [13] That same year, the company held a second funding round, raising $90 million. [10] In 2020, Grammarly made its first investment in an outside company, participating in a $10 million funding round for Docugami, a company working on AI-driven document generation. [14] In 2021, Grammarly raised another $200 million, at a total valuation of $13 billion, via its third funding round. [15] By this point, Grammarly had approximately 30 million users. [16]

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Grammarly ceased all business operations in Russia and Belarus. The company also announced that it would donate all the net revenue it had earned in Russia and Belarus since 2014, about $5 million, to Ukrainian humanitarian groups. [17] [18] Additionally, the company paid the salaries of Ukrainians who left their jobs at Grammarly to join the nation's army [19] and made its product free for Ukrainian journalists publishing news about the war in English. [17]

In April 2023, Grammarly launched a product using generative AI built on the GPT-3 large language models. [20] The software can generate and rewrite content based on prompts. [21] It can also generate topic ideas and outlines for written content such as blog posts and academic essays. [22] It has been trained on an anonymized library of business writing and is capable of suggesting clarifying edits and additions to work communications such as emails and chat messages. [23] In September 2024, Grammarly announced the release of its Authorship tool, which attempts to identify the original source of a passage of text. It then designates the passage as written by the text's author, lifted from another source, or generated by AI. [24] [25] It's not clear to what extent such tools work. [26] [27]

In July 2024, Grammarly donated approximately $500,000 to help rebuild Okhmatdyt children's hospital after the building was damaged by a Russian missile strike. [28] [29]

On December 17 2024, an blog article on document editor Coda's blog was published, saying that Grammarly was accquiring it for an undisclosed amount. [30] In the article, it was stated that Coda's CEO, Shishir Mehrota was "happy to take Coda to a new direction, after 10 years of working with it". It also stated the Grammarly's writing AI would be merged in the 'near future', which is thought to be sometime in 2025.

Vulnerabilities

In early 2018, Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google who was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team, [31] discovered a severe vulnerability in Grammarly's browser extension, which exposed authentication tokens to websites and potentially allowed them to access the users' documents and other data. [32] A few hours later, the company released a hotfix and reported that it found no evidence of compromised user data. [33] Later in December, Grammarly launched a bug bounty program on HackerOne, offering a US$100,000 reward to the first white hat hacker to access a specific document on the company's server. [34]

Reception

Reviewers have praised Grammarly for its ease of use and helpful suggestions, considering it worthwhile despite its relatively high price and lack of offline functionality. [35] Conversely, some users have criticized Grammarly for incorrect suggestions, ignorance of tone and context, and reduction of writers' freedom of expression. [36] [37]

Documents whose contents have been corrected via Grammarly have occasionally been accused by detection engines such as Turnitin of being partially or entirely AI-generated. [38] Schools are struggling to develop rules about its use that are consistent and fair, with some teachers recommending Grammarly to all of their students and others rejecting it. [39] [40]

Grammarly Inc.

Grammarly Inc.
IndustrySoftware, Artificial intelligence
Founded2009 [8]
FoundersAlex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider [8]
Headquarters San Francisco, CA [17]
Key people
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury (CEO) [41]

Grammarly Inc., the privately held company [42] that develops Grammarly, is headquartered in San Francisco. [43] It has additional offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver. [44] Grammarly Inc. is led by Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, who became the company's CEO in 2023. [41]

See also

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References

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  41. 1 2 Duttagupta, Ishani (March 22, 2023). "Indian-American Rahul Ray-Chowdhury named CEO of Grammarly". Times of India. Retrieved September 30, 2024.
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