San Francisco-based startup with Ukrainian founders Grammarly has raised $110 million as it looks to speed growth and ramp up hiring.
The first ever institutional funding round for Grammarly was led by General Catalyst with participation from SignalFire, Spark Capital, Breyer Capital and IVP.
Grammarly was initially developed in 2009 for academic needs, but later, Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, the co-founders of Grammarly, expanded the circle of potential customers and developed the service for anyone on the internet who wants to make their writing flawless.
As a result, the two Ukrainians has created a web-based service where one can upload a text in English and have the Grammarly algorithms to scan the text for errors within a matter of seconds.
The service has famous corporate clients such as Boeing and Cisco and accounts now for 7 million unique users daily. Ukrainians account for 7 percent of Grammarly users, and Lytvyn says his company might not be as successful as it’s now without the local talents.
“We managed to make this product because we started in Ukraine and found talented specialists,” Lytvyn told the Kyiv Post in an interview a year ago. “It’s just that we started to do a product not for Ukraine, but for the world. This is a good rule for all product companies.”
One can register on the Grammarly website and start scanning texts for free. In this case, the service checks the most obvious common mistakes. Signing up for a premium version guarantees a more complex check-up. This version costs from $30 monthly to $140 yearly.
The Grammarly app is available in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers, Microsoft Word or Windows and Mac desktops.
The company has just 100 team members on staff located in three cities: San Francisco, New York and Kyiv.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
