Grammarly is an online grammar checking server based on the technology that uses artificial intelligence. Nowadays, over 4 million people around the world use this service. Company founders consider their product the best web grammar checking service in the world.
The startup was founded by two residents of Kyiv, Aleksey Shevchenko and Maksim Litvin, in 2009. The first version of the product was released in Kyiv.
Grammarly founders got acquainted while studying together at the International Christian University in Kyiv. It was one of the universities in Ukraine where the study programs were conducted entirely in English, and all professors were native Americans. It was during their studying that Shevchenko and Litvin had the idea of their first startup. They thought about creating a service that would check students’ texts for plagiarism.
Grammarly is a subscription-based web-service that enables writing texts in accordance with all the rules of the English language. It can track grammatical and syntactic errors and incorrect word choice in real-time. Beyond that, the service provides an explanation of why a particular figure of speech should not be used and suggests more correct options.
Grammarly products are easy to use. You only need to write, copy or paste any text written in English into Grammarly’s Editor or install the free extension for your browser and afterwards, the spelling check will be performed on Gmail, Facebook, and other services. The algorithm will highlight potential errors in your text and suggest possible corrections. Users can see those issues and make a conscious decision about whether or how to correct the mistakes or not.
Initially, there was a small team of linguists in North America and several Ukrainian developers working on the project. Over time the team has grown and now it consists of about 70 people in the Grammarly Kyiv office and 14 more work in San Francisco. The division of tasks is rather traditional, just like in all similar companies. The development unit is located in Kyiv, whereas the staff in the USA are dealing with sales and marketing.
An interesting fact is that 60-70 % of the service users are from English-speaking countries and are native speakers. Only as of 2017 Grammarly has attracted $110 million of investments.
To this day, the Ukrainian startup Grammarly was valued at more than $1 Billion.
