The new funding brought on new investors including Baillie Gifford and BlackRock, Grammarly’s CEO disclosed in a blog post. That round was led by General Catalyst and included participation from IVP, among others. A reflection of its international roots, Grammarly has offices in San Francisco, Vancouver and Kyiv, Ukraine.īefore the most recent round, Grammarly raised $90 million from investors at a valuation of $1 billion in October 2019. They then brought to life their vision for MyDropBox, which was ultimately acquired by educational technology company Blackboard. and Canada, respectively, to get their MBAs at Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto. The scandal faded into an almost forgotten blip on their records when Lytvyn and Shevchenko moved to the U.S. “We never ever, ever sold any papers that were uploaded to our service," Shevchenko told the publication in 2002. They told The Chronicle of Higher Education at the time that they had been hired to program a paper-mill site, but denied any connection between the two businesses. Their mission may sound noble, but there were some questions raised about Lyvtyn and Shevchenko’s motivations early in their business journey when it was discovered that two online services they had launched to help professors check student papers for plagiarism (precursors to MyDropBox) appeared to have ties to websites selling term papers to students. “This led us to ask a serious underlying question: Why do people choose to plagiarize in the first place? Could it be that they were finding it difficult to communicate what they meant in their own voice?” “We had built a product to help keep plagiarism out of students’ writing,” Lyvtyn wrote in a blog post in March. The pair, who met while attending the International Christian University in Ukraine, say the idea for Grammarly actually came from their previous venture, MyDropBox, which dates back to their college days. This isn’t the only company Lytvyn and Shevchenko have started together. “That was an inflection point for us,” Grammarly CEO Brad Hoover told Fast Company in a 2019 interview, explaining that “word-of-mouth growth really, really took off.” Today, the company claims to reach 30 million people each day through its operations across 500,000 applications and websites, including email apps, numerous web browsers, social media and Microsoft Word. Grammary’s key product has been widely available under a freemium model since 2015, with the option to purchase upgraded versions for prices ranging from $12 to $30 a month. The company has also released spin-off products like Grammarly for Business, an edition of its grammar checker for corporate use which boasts big-name clients like Zoom, Cisco, Dell and Expedia. It has since evolved away from its sole focus on education and opened up access to its intelligence-driven grammar checker, which can be used to easily weed out the errors in emails, documents and more. The San Francisco-based company was launched over a decade ago under the quickly abandoned name Sentenceworks as a subscription-based product aimed at helping students with their grammar and spelling.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |