Grammarly has announced a rebrand of its company name to Superhuman. The original Grammarly spell-check tool will remain a sub-brand of the company, which offers email and document-making platforms under this new brand.
The document platform is a result of Grammarly’s acquisition of Coda at the end of 2023, after which it made Coda co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra the CEO of the combined company.
In an interview with Newsweek before Wednesday morning’s announcement, Mehrotra shared that the rebrand and new product launch “needed to go together.”
“Our main observation about the opportunity starts from this idea that Grammarly is a misunderstood product,” he said. “People see it as being about grammar, but it's actually about bringing AI right to where people work…That frame is very different than how people currently think about it. Because of that, we thought it was very important for us to have a different corporate name.”
In April, Mehrotra, a former Google and Microsoft executive, told Newsweek that a rebrand was imminent, as he explained the expanded product vision for Grammarly with Coda.
"The core technology has very little to do with grammar," he explained. "It's the ability to run an AI agent right on the edge, right next to the user. We validated about 500,000 different websites, desktop applications, mobile applications, where we can, alongside you, annotate and take action, with your consent."
In July, Grammarly acquired the AI email app Superhuman, founded by serial entrepreneur Rahul Vohra, who sold his previous company to LinkedIn. Vohra stayed with the company, now bearing the name of his old company, as the general manager of the email product division. Email is the most common “writing surface” for Grammarly users, offering strong alignment between the two AI native work suite offerings.
The main thrust of the new Superhuman’s product vision is the Grammarly “AI superhighway,” as Mehrotra has put it, the core technology that was originally used to help users correct their spelling and syntax in their word processors, emails or chat apps. The vision of the new company is to use the superhighway to bring different rules or different data sources to help the user in their document creation or communication.
Superhuman Go is the productized version of the superhighway. In a product demonstration shared with Newsweek, the new agentic AI tool brings recommendations to user-generated text from data sources such as the CRM, inventory management and other internal tools.
“We're opening with a very broad set of agents that we've developed, as well as third parties have developed to allow anybody to bring AI right into our users’ work,” Mehrotra said. One of the partner agents is from Kim Scott, author of "Radical Candor," whose communication style recommendations are folded into the notifications.
As Mehrotra previously told Newsweek, he envisions running the company like a "compound startup," with email, Coda, Superhuman Go and other product lines that may be launched via acquisition or internally in the near future running independently.
“Each of these units, some that we've built, some that we've acquired, run as independent business units,” Mehrotra shared. “We have many other products we're working on that hopefully we'll be able to announce to the world very soon.”