Your teachers may have told you that grammar is important, but did they mention that it can make you a billionaire?
A $ 200 million investment round announced last week by popular grammar tool Grammarly not only boosted the company's value to $ 13 billion, but made two of its founders, Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, billionaires. Entrepreneurs of Ukrainian descent, who started the automated writing assistant in 2009 with the help of programmer Dmytro Lider, are now worth at least $ 4 billion each thanks to recent funding, according to Forbes.
About 22% of Grammarly is owned by investors involved in its two rounds of financing in 2019 and 2021, according to data collected by Pitchbook. Meanwhile, Lider, the third co-founder, holds only 1% of the shares. That leaves Lytvyn and Shevchenko with about 35% each of Grammarly's capital, worth roughly $ 4 billion each.
Grammarly opposes Forbes estimates, but has provided no evidence to support a different assessment of its co-founders. "Grammarly is a private company and does not disclose the distribution or ownership figures of the company," the company's communications chief Senka Hadzimuratovic said in an email.
The San Francisco-based company was launched more than a decade ago under the quickly abandoned name Sentenceworks as a subscription-based product designed to help students with their grammar and spelling. Since then, he has moved away from his sole focus on education and has opened access to his intelligence-driven grammar controller, which can be used to easily eliminate errors in emails, documents and more. The company has also released spin-off products such as Grammarly for Business, a corporate grammar checker edition that boasts large clients such as Zoom, Cisco, Dell and Expedia.
Grammary’s flagship 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 per month. Today, the company claims to reach 30 million people every day through its operations on 500,000 applications and websites, including email applications, multiple web browsers, social media and Microsoft Word.
This is not the only company that Lytvyn and Shevchenko have started together. The couple, 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. "We had built a product to help keep plagiarism out of student writing," Lyvtyn wrote in a blog post in March. "This made us ask a serious fundamental question: Why do people choose to plagiarize in the first place?" Could it be that they found it difficult to communicate what they wanted to say in their own voice? ”
MyDropBox was purchased by educational technology company Blackboard. It appears the co-founders may still be living in Vancouver and it is unclear whether the two men gained citizenship in the US or Canada. Grammarly has offices in San Francisco, Vancouver and Kiev, Ukraine.
Ahead of the most recent round, Grammarly raised $ 90 million from investors with a valuation of $ 1 billion in October 2019. This round was led by General Catalyst and included participation from IVP, among others. The new funding brought in new investors, including Baillie Gifford and BlackRock.
