The Technology Is Finally There: Grammarly’s Co-Founder on $1B in New Funding and AI’s Communication Revolution

Grammarly launched 16 years ago. You are announcing a $1 billion round this week. What took so long — and was this always the vision?

The vision was always bigger than a spell-checker. From the very beginning, we believed that helping people communicate more effectively could have an enormous impact — not just on individual writing, but on how ideas move through organisations, through society. The challenge was always that technology just wasn’t there to make it possible. For years, we were constrained by what natural language models could do. The emerging technology has been an accelerant — we can do way more now. The $1 billion round is about moving fast on a vision that has been waiting for this moment.

Generative AI has created a new class of competitors that can handle grammar correction out of the box. How do you maintain an edge?

Some of the things that only we could do, now anybody could do. That’s fine, that’s the nature of technology. What does not change is scale and ubiquitous integration. Grammarly is embedded in hundreds of applications that people use every day. We have 16 years of understanding what users actually struggle with in communication. We have 40 million daily users giving us feedback. That kind of distribution and data does not appear overnight. Moving fast means building fast, expanding the market fast, and potentially acquiring other companies to accelerate progress.

The co-founders of Grammarly brought in a professional CEO relatively early — in 2011. That’s unusual. Why?

Both Alex, my co-founder, and I have a philosophy that everybody should be in their zone of genius — doing what they like and what they are good at. Neither of us was really experienced or even particularly passionate about scaling large organisations. That was the biggest thing we were looking for from a CEO: someone to teach us, and to do the scaling work that needed to be done. We realised that to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish, we need a lot of people. We need a big company. Size is not a desired outcome in itself; it is a necessity because the goals are so big that you cannot do it with 20 or 30 people.

The education sector seems to be caught in a loop on AI — ban it, allow it, ban it again. What is your read?

The educational system has to teach people to use AI effectively, rather than ban it. Students will need AI skills after they graduate and enter the workforce. Banning it in academic settings does not prepare them for reality; it just creates a gap between education and the world they are entering. We have built tools like Authorship — a feature that identifies which parts of a document are original, AI-generated, or copied from other sources. That is almost like a next iteration of plagiarism detection, which is actually where I started. The question is not whether AI will be in the workplace. It will be. The question is whether people are ready for it.

What does this moment mean for Ukraine specifically, given that Grammarly has its roots there?

Grammarly was founded by three Ukrainians. The original engineering team was built in Kyiv. That background shaped us — resourceful, technical, determined, used to building without abundant capital. Ukraine has a long tradition of strong engineering talent. The current moment in Ukraine is devastating, but the human quality does not disappear. I think about the Ukrainian developers and researchers who are contributing to global companies and global technology even now. That resilience is real and it matters.