Grammarly launched 16 years ago as a grammar-checking tool, but its founders always had more ambitious plans. One of them, Max Lytvyn, previously ran a plagiarism detection startup where he saw how often people struggled not with honesty, but with the sheer difficulty of writing clearly. With Grammarly, he set out to make the process of translating thoughts into words less intimidating. “Technology just wasn’t there to make it possible,” Lytvyn told Observer at the Web Summit in Vancouver this week.
That’s no longer the case. What began as a tool for fixing grammatical errors has evolved into a sophisticated A.I. platform helping users communicate more effectively across emails, documents, and messaging apps. Now, with a new $1 billion funding round led by General Catalyst—announced yesterday (May 29)—the San Francisco-based company is preparing to scale its A.I. capabilities even further.
The rise of generative A.I. has also brought a roster of newfound rivals. “Some of the things that only we could do, now anybody could do. That’s fine, that’s the nature of technology,” said Lytvyn. He noted that Grammarly still retains the benefit of scale and ubiquitous integration across applications.
Will higher education embrace A.I.?
“The educational system has to teach to use A.I. effectively, rather than ban it,” said Lytvyn, who noted that students will need A.I. skills after they graduate and enter the workforce.
To support academic institutions navigating the challenges of A.I., Grammarly has rolled out tools like Authorship—a feature that identifies which parts of a document are original, A.I.-generated or copied from other sources. The tool echoes Lytvyn’s early work in plagiarism detection. “It’s almost like a next iteration of plagiarism detection,” he said.