VCs Put $110M into Grammar-Checking Software
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's no Snapchat or Instagram, but it's comparable to, say, Docker in magnitude and trajectory. I hear from a lot of writers through my own websites, and I hear them mention Grammarly more and more often lately.
That's not to say the $110M investment makes sense, just that Grammarly may be more popular than the community here realizes.
I could see why their daily user engagement would be really good but I wonder what their paid conversion rate is because I imagine it wouldn't be that great in the US.
I use Grammarly daily. The subscription is cheap compared to hiring a proofreader, which I used to do. The market for ESL speakers is huge, and native speakers, too, can often benefit from improving their writing.
"only half of the mass if accounted for by the stars", misspelling "if" -> "is"
"in the heath death scenario", misspelling "heath" -> "heat"
"The quantity follows Gaussian distribution.", missing article
If you are going to make a criticism, don't make a sarcastic or snarky comment.
Instead, make an argument about why there is no potential in a product that:
+ increases the quality & productivity of one of the most valuable and professional skills that's used in 99% of all jobs
+ has a potential customer base of over 1 billion people
+ has near-zero marginal costs
+ has increasing returns to scale due to its cost structure
+ has increasing returns to scale due to its product development being based on learning from user data
+ is based on a new machine learning paradigm that has recently made huge gains and has unknown potential
And just think about the value of writing. Some people make their entire living from writing (journalism, etc.). A large fraction of the population needs good writing skills in their job, just to share information and persuade others to act. If improving your writing - on items like your cover letter, your professional emails, your product - gives you a 1% boost to productivity and a 1% higher chance of a promotion, then this $110M is nothing compared to those percentages multiplied over the English-speaking population.
Of course, the whole idea could be a bust. But if you think so, make the argument why. Resist the temptation to post brief, snarky comments about how VCs are stupid.
Just look at threads about Facebook, for example. It's usually just pure unsubstantiated hate and very little intelligent/interesting comments.
$12/month, but only if you prepay annually. It's $30 if you want month to month.
That makes you wonder if the high investment is then for something shady...they have indirect access to email content, for example. Or, something like AI hype.
- Requires complete access to all the data you type
- They don't own any platforms, and the product is potentially a core feature of a platform/service. For example if Google decides to roll their own grammar service and tightly integrate it with chrome, how would grammarly complete?
>User Content you transmit will be stored on our servers, which are located in the United States. When you use the Software on your computing device, User Content you save will be stored locally on that device and sync with our servers.
How well would adoption would be if more users realized (most) everything they type in a web browser is stored on a remote server? I also wonder how often employees have violated HIPAA or something similar via a careless Chrome extension installation like this one.
Maybe they have a solid security policy and won't use "User Content" for nefarious reasons, but this is one free product I'll avoid.
If you are a HIPAA covered entity, you probably shouldn't be allowing anyone to have the ability to install any software, including browser extensions, on any workstation they can use to access PHI, and any centrally installed software should have a privacy and security review before being permitted.
Of course, I know that's often not true, but that's a high-level organizational failure.
EDIT: apparently it's used with Gmail, so the answer is yes they are parsing business strategies, private conversations, and other personal things in their data pipeline with, quoted from a comment further down, "presumably a future play in adtech or AI".
As a physician trying to do research, this stunted my work for years. It is a minor miracle we got off the ground at all.
The Japanese government has rules on which IME (The software that sits between the alphabetical keyboard and the thousands of Japanese characters that are needed in normal text) public employees can use, since some of them draw on remote data and ML algorithms.
Baidu has a really good and popular Japanese IME which uses a large server side dataset and is problematic in official use for obvious reasons.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/grammarly-raises-110-milli...
How can you be sure that a service, like Grammarly, isn't selling it's user's data, or will do so in the future?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...
Editor, $55, https://www.serenity-software.com
StyleWriter, $90 - $190, http://www.editorsoftware.com/StyleWriter.html
Of course that doesn't explain $110M.
I was surprised that neither has an API.
And I suspect (although don't know) that word online also got this functionality, or will at some stage in the future.
My bet, this is $110m up in flames in a few years' time.
https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/26/the-evolution-of-office-...
But when using with long articles it's grammar check isn't perfect. I hope they get better. Best of luck Grammarly!
ATTN: Grammarly only works on desktop computers (not smartphones or tablet devices). Please re-open this email on a supported device to use the features mentioned here.
They have lots of work to do. I see why they needed the money!
Outside of the obviously errors, it does a pretty bad job of understanding context.
Looks like our future will have even more semi-literate people with college degrees than we do now.
It sums it up pretty well. AI is the buzzwords these days in VC circles.
If they're going to be as profitable as their valuation implies, why give away so much of the company? There's no way they need that many engineers. Is it just for a massive marketing campaign?
It's me, Clippy.
It looks like you're about to waste a lot of venture capital money.
> The founders of Grammarly had eschewed venture capital since setting up the company in 2009. Grammarly said its business is profitable.
It's hard for us to say without knowing the actual details and business metrics, but it's quite silly for you to dismiss their 8 year old profitable business without knowing anything.