Ever wondered if correcting grammar errors on emails, other files can make you a billionaire? It seems possible.
The popular artificial intelligence-based online grammar checking tool Grammarly has made two of its founders– Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn – billionaires. According to the Forbes Billionaires Index, both Shevchenko and Lytvyn are worth $4 billion respectively as of February 8. Alex Shevchenko, who is also the co-founder at the company, works as the product lead at Grammarly and oversees product development, ensuring that every aspect of Grammarly’s products gets audience’s attention. Max, on the other hand, works as the head of revenue and focuses on identifying and expanding new market opportunities for Grammarly’s product portfolio.
Grammarly is not the first company founded by Shevchenko and Lytvyn. Prior to this, they co-founded MyDropBox, a plagiarism detection company, which was later acquired by Blackboard. In November last year, the company raised funds worth over $200 million at a valuation of $13 billion in a fresh funding round led by investors like Baillie Gifford and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. The company has big ticket clients like Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Expedia Group and Zoom Video Communications. Grammarly uses AI/ML to assist with basic writing, spell-check, grammar, tone of language and context. Some of its other services include a plagiarism detector. Grammarly was founded in the year 2009 and the Grammarly Editor was introduced in 2010. Grammarly introduced its Microsoft Office add-in feature in the year 2013 and the browser extensions and the Freemium model was introduced in 2015. 2015 was also the year when Grammarly had over 1,000,000 daily active users (DAUs). The company introduced its desktop app for Windows, used by most of us for correcting errors in emails, in the year 2016. Grammarly introduced mobile keyboards in 2017 and its business offering – Grammarly Business launch in 2018. The company logged in 20,000,000 DAUs in 2019 and 30,000,000 DAUs in 2020. Grammarly also went the Apple route with its offering – Grammarly for iPad in 2020.
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