San Francisco-based Grammarly, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance writing, has made at least two of its founders Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko billionaires.
According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, both Lytvyn and Shevchenko are worth at least $2.4 billion each. The position of Grammarly's third co-founder Dmytro Lider is not known.
Grammarly was started by three Ukrainians in 2009 and now has more than 600 employees and 30 million daily active users across the globe. The startup tech firm became one of the biggest unicorns in the world after raising $200 million in November last year, valuing the company at $13 billion. BlackRock Inc and Baillie Gifford were among the top investors in the company.
In 2019, Grammarly had raised $90 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, TechCrunch reported. The funding had come just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic which had forced office goers to work remotely.
"We saw our business accelerate with the move to remote work," Brad Hoover, the company’s CEO, said.
The surge in Grammarly’s valuation reflects the stunning growth in recent years. The company has a loyal base of enterprise customers such as Cisco, Dell Technologies, Zoom Video Communications and Expedia Group Inc, Reuters said.
The Grammarly founders represent a host of other successful techies from the Soviet bloc like the recently-listed GitLab Inc, a software tools platform, which was also founded by two Ukrainians.
"We're proud to represent Ukraine on the world stage," Bloomberg quoted Shevchenko as saying in an email.
Lytvyn and Shevchenko, who had been friends since 1990s when they were students in Kyiv, hit upon the idea of Grammarly from a previous venture they had created to help prevent plagiarism. Hoover joined in 2011 from venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners.
The company’s first major breakthrough came in 2014, when it launched a freemium business model with basic features and the option to pay for advanced ones. The following year, Grammarly released free browser extensions. This helped the company build a base of millions of daily users.
Grammarly expects business to thrive in the flexible work environment.
"To fundamentally enable people to communicate and connect, to unlock problems, reduce disputes, come up with new ideas. All those things are relevant to remote work," Hoover said.
