It’s been clear for a while that Grammarly isn’t content with just catching your comma splices and split infinitives. In its latest move, the AI writing assistant has announced plans to acquire Superhuman, the buzzy email app known for its lightning-fast interface and AI-driven follow‑up suggestions. On paper, it’s a match made in productivity heaven—Grammarly gets a dedicated email client to showcase its tools, and Superhuman plugs into a massive user base eager for smarter writing assistance.
Email is already Grammarly’s “number‑one use case” among professionals, according to the company’s press release. Its AI assistant currently helps users revise over 50 million emails every week across more than 20 different email providers, from Gmail to Outlook. Owning the inbox outright means Grammarly can bake its AI even deeper into the experience—instead of merely offering a browser extension, it can become the default co‑pilot in your mail client.
Superhuman, last valued at $825 million in 2021, brings its own performance metrics to the table: users reportedly handle 72% more emails per hour when using its AI‑powered tools. While financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, Superhuman’s roughly $35 million in annual revenue and team of over 100 employees—including CEO Rahul Vohra—will now call Grammarly home.
But email is only the opening act. Grammarly’s broader ambition is to build what it calls an AI productivity platform—a suite of “intelligent, task‑specific agents” tailored to different work needs. Imagine this: you’re drafting a customer‑success memo and, instead of toggling between tools, you have a communication agent to polish your tone, a sales agent to insert data insights, a support agent to flag potential issues, and a marketing agent to optimize calls to action—all working in concert.
In the words of Grammarly’s leadership, this “future platform” will let users “work with multiple agents simultaneously,” transforming the inbox into a command center for everything from scheduling to analytics. It’s a bold vision that leans heavily on the concept of AI agents, an idea that companies like OpenAI and Google are also racing to implement in their own toolkits.
Grammarly isn’t walking this path alone. In late May, it secured $1 billion in non‑dilutive financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, specifically earmarked for product development, strategic acquisitions, and scaling up sales and marketing. That follows December’s purchase of the productivity startup Coda—an all‑stock deal that ushered Coda’s CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, into the role of Grammarly’s helmsman.
Taken together, these moves amount to a clear pivot: no longer just a niche grammar tool, Grammarly is angling to be a multi‑product company with a dashboard of AI‑driven assistants, each licensed to tackle a different slice of the modern workday.
Of course, Grammarly’s agentic dreams put it squarely in the ring with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest heavy hitters. OpenAI has rolled out its own suite of “function‑calling” tools that let developers build customizable agents, while Google is hard at work integrating its Gemini models into Workspace and beyond. Even Microsoft—with its Copilot offerings in Office apps—is aiming to be the default AI co‑author for enterprise customers. For Grammarly, the key will be differentiating through writing expertise and a seamless user experience.
Visionary roadmaps aside, execution is everything. Integrating an email client into a writing‑focused platform poses UX challenges: will long‑time Superhuman fans tolerate Grammarly’s suggestion overlays? Can Grammarly maintain Superhuman’s trademark speed and keyboard‑centric navigation? And on the business side, will this move truly attract enterprise budgets, or simply cannibalize existing browser‑extension users?
Grammarly’s acquisition of Superhuman is a smart bet on email-as-ground-zero for productivity tools. Armed with fresh capital and a growing portfolio of agentic experiments, the company is staking its claim in the burgeoning market for AI-driven work assistants. But turning that claim into reality will require nimble integration, thoughtful product design, and an uncanny ability to out‑engineer the AI ambitions of Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft. If it pulls it off, the humble spell‑checker could become the nerve center of our next‑generation workflows; if not, it may find itself outpaced by platforms with deeper pockets and broader suites.
Either way, for the millions who start their day in a cluttered inbox, the next chapter of Grammarly’s story is about to arrive—right between “Inbox Zero” and “Sent Items.”
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