"Grammarly announced Tuesday the acquisition of email client Superhuman in a push to build out its AI for its productivity suite. Neither companies provided details about the financial terms of the deal..... Superhuman was founded by Rahul Vohra, Vivek Sodera, and Conrad Irwin. The company raised more than $114 million in funding from backers including a16z, IVP, and Tiger Global, with its last valuation at $825 million, according to data from venture data analytics firm Traxcn." [1]
Interested to understand what would be the terms of the deal if Superhuman was valued at $825mm and what the founders cleared if the all the VCs rounds had 2-3x liquidation preferences.
The company is being rebranded, not the product. Makes total sense, considering the brand equity, and also them going in the direction of productivity suite. Could be interesting.
The name Superhuman makes a lot more sense for a company with a suite of AI productivity products. The "Grammarly" name was too focused on their original use case of just improving writing.
Given their extensive expertise in browser and OS plugins, I understand this move.
You can foresee a challenging future for the Grammarly product for a long time. Now that the "improve writing with AI" feature is everywhere, there are fewer reasons to pay for their subscription (e.g., I didn't renew this year because I have multiple AI subscriptions, and Grammarly was the least critical of them).
However, for me, the main advantage of Grammarly was the user experience of having mistakes and suggestions inline and just a click away while editing, as well as the quality of the suggestions (with an LLM chat, there's a lot of trial and error and junk you need to filter out).
I understand their move, but I wish they had developed a good minimalist native text editor with the same Grammarly suggestions and click-to-correct interface.
This is getting to the antivirus bundle level of adding pointless features. I want grammarly to... check my grammar. I don't want it to write for me or suggest things.
Maybe it's just because I'm a reasonably decent writer but I used to know someone who was adamant about using Grammarly because it would increase traffic to my website--and I was basically "don't care."
ADDED: Because it would make the writing friendlier to more people.
For those who find red squiggly lines too distracting, I built a lightweight Chrome extension (<1MB) that approaches grammar correction in a minimalistic way: Highlight text -> Select "Correct grammar" from the toolbar -> Replace text.
The quality is unmatched because it uses SOTA models like GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini.
I get that software companies are rebranding products with superhero/god terminology to increase their perceived value and raise margin, but its not working for me because they are losing product differentiation. Why would I choose this app among the dozens of other tech products that promise godlike AI capabilities?
Even if we haven't hit the LLM ceiling, we've hit a ceiling on branding for sure. I'm interested to see where these names go next. Uberbeing! Omnipotence Plugin!
Grammarly is a powerful writing assistant that offers grammar, punctuation, and style suggestions to improve your writing. It’s an essential tool for maintaining your unique voice in a world filled with generic, LLM-generated content. With Grammarly, you can ensure your words stand out and resonate amidst the noise.
I absolutely hate it when companies rename themselves. I know a company called an extremely stupid name by its young founder and they did not rename for decades and are now worth a bit short of $4T.
Why do the smaller ones constantly need to change their name. Like that changes anything in their substance.
Moving to "AI" and away from a well-known brand smacks of desperation. Makes me wonder if the industry-wide trend of shoving AI into every product and feature, and channelling all investment into AI, is equally desperate.
One day, we will see a demand for services that are the opposite of "Superhuman". For example, a service like: "Deteriorate this text and make it look weirdly human. Add some typos and errors here and there, so that the final output looks 100% human-written."
Stop using Grammarly. There are better options available that don't exist just to collect your data to sell it to the highest bidder or feed it into an LLM.
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[ 555 ms ] story [ 514 ms ] threadInterested to understand what would be the terms of the deal if Superhuman was valued at $825mm and what the founders cleared if the all the VCs rounds had 2-3x liquidation preferences.
edit: added source
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/grammarly-acquires-ai-emai...
You can foresee a challenging future for the Grammarly product for a long time. Now that the "improve writing with AI" feature is everywhere, there are fewer reasons to pay for their subscription (e.g., I didn't renew this year because I have multiple AI subscriptions, and Grammarly was the least critical of them).
However, for me, the main advantage of Grammarly was the user experience of having mistakes and suggestions inline and just a click away while editing, as well as the quality of the suggestions (with an LLM chat, there's a lot of trial and error and junk you need to filter out).
I understand their move, but I wish they had developed a good minimalist native text editor with the same Grammarly suggestions and click-to-correct interface.
ADDED: Because it would make the writing friendlier to more people.
The quality is unmatched because it uses SOTA models like GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini.
Yes, you can use your own API key as well.
https://jetwriter.ai
Why do the smaller ones constantly need to change their name. Like that changes anything in their substance.