Sick of typos? Grammarly’s $110m funding could fix that

9 May 2017

Image: B Calkins/Shutterstock

Grammarly, a start-up aiming to improve typos, tone and delivery in digitally written content, has raised $110m in its latest funding round.

Typos and grammar are the bugbears of many consumers of the internet, with some merely biding their time before a poorly placed ‘its’ or ‘their’ emerges and then bam! It’s time to write a correction.

For some, speaking in a second or third language or, perhaps, merely writing as they have always done, this is not a concern. But for the rest, Grammarly is an appealing concept.

Popularity of Grammarly

Working in a similar fashion to the ‘spell check’ function within Microsoft Word, Grammarly seeks to eliminate clumsy content. With its use in the wild often coming through its extension on Chrome, the company’s free grammar checker tool is used by almost 7m people on a daily basis.

The popularity of the service, which Grammarly claims is already profitable, has helped it to secure $110m in funding this week.

“Millions of users rely on Grammarly every day to make their messages, documents and social media posts clear, mistake-free and impactful,” said the company.

General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley VC firm, led the round, presumably with the intention to ramp up Grammarly’s premium service.

Better checks, with more detailed tools, are available through this. Grammarly is, in essence, a standard freemium product.

Grammarly claims its products help people to communicate more effectively, but this investment is perhaps more focused on how the AI works, rather than the end product.

Start-up success

While $110m is significant, it is but 20pc of the largest funding round of the week.

Yesterday, Singapore-based Garena rebranded as Sea, raised $550m and put a big focus on an Indonesian market destined for immense corporate competition.

With Tencent already a backer, Sea saw several new investors get involved in the latest funding round, adding to the $170m raised by the company a little more than one year ago.

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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