8 ms·
Grammarly rebrands to 'Superhuman,' launches a new AI assistant
- nkko 1y agoThe company is being rebranded, not the product. Makes total sense, considering the brand equity, and also them going in the direction of productivity suite. Could be interesting.
- haltingproblem 1y ago"Grammarly announced Tuesday the acquisition of email client Superhuman in a push to build out its AI for its productivity suite. Neither companies provided details about the financial terms of the deal..... Superhuman was founded by Rahul Vohra, Vivek Sodera, and Conrad Irwin. The company raised more than $114 million in funding from backers including a16z, IVP, and Tiger Global, with its last valuation at $825 million, according to data from venture data analytics firm Traxcn." [1] Interested to understand what would be the terms of the deal if Superhuman was valued at $825mm and what the founders cleared if the all the VCs rounds had 2-3x liquidation preferences. edit: added source [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/grammarly-acquires-ai-email-client-superhuman/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/grammarly-acquires-ai-emai...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nathancahill 1y agoAcquired 4 months ago, rebranding now.
- treetalker 1y agoJust as everything tends to evolve into something resembling a crab, all software seems to eventually become email — and, now, an LLM.
- MajimasEyepatch 1y agoTo be fair, productivity and writing tools are a better fit for LLMs than a lot of other use cases.
- treetalker 1y agoResponding to you and fullshark, I'm not criticizing, only observing. Just as there is some evolutionary pressure causing carcinization, it's interesting to consider what pressure pushes things in the directions of email and LLMs. I don't know what it is, but would love to hear others' ideas.
- wredcoll 1y agoI think "email" is a bit of a overly specific term, but if we take a small step back, communicating with other humans is usually the most important part of any piece of software.
- lm28469 1y agoI have a feeling these things will spend 99% of their processing time reading other LLMs outputs. Resumes written by LLMs and read by LLMs PR summaries written by LLMs and read by LLMs Emails written by LLMs and read by LLMs ... Everything could just be a few bullet points... these things were already 90% posturing and trying to sound fancy by using convoluted sentences and big words, now that it's been automated what's the point
- fullshark 1y agoThis company cannot afford to ignore LLMs.
- Brajeshwar 1y ago“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” — Zawinski’s Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
- jhaile 1y agoThe name Superhuman makes a lot more sense for a company with a suite of AI productivity products. The "Grammarly" name was too focused on their original use case of just improving writing.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoIt is a good product name. I can almost imagine an unimaginably rich AI company buying it just for the name.
- cardanome 1y ago"Superhuman" gives me the creeps as a German. I know it has a positive connotation with super heroes in US culture but for me it sounds like Übermensch. Especially as it is the direct opposite of "subhuman". Plus outside of tech bro circles, people either actively hate generative AI or are at least super annoyed by the over-hype of it. Duolingo went all in on AI and got a huge shitstorm. Branding your company on a current hype that might either burst soon or/and leave lots of people unemployed is maybe not a wise decisions.
- antiloper 1y ago"Superhuman" is just "Superman" but without getting sued by DC comics.
- triceratops 1y agoI thought Grammarly's brand was far better known than "Superhuman". I've never seen a YouTube ad for the latter.
- Yizahi 1y agoImagine searching web or any system really for "superhuman". Grammarly will be buried ten pages deep under other results.
- chemotaxis 1y agoIt won't be. Similarly, searching for "x" on Google returns Twitter as the first hit. Search results are optimized based on inferred intent, and the intent of most people searching for "superhuman" will be the Grammarly app.
- array_key_first 1y agoX is still a stupid brand name and I refuse to believe anyone who works in marketing would ever come up with that.
- recapthis 1y agoStrange that they didn't create a new name. Could it be that that was a deal breaker for Superhuman company and Grammarly wanted the deal so much?
- diegof79 1y agoGiven their extensive expertise in browser and OS plugins, I understand this move. You can foresee a challenging future for the Grammarly product for a long time. Now that the "improve writing with AI" feature is everywhere, there are fewer reasons to pay for their subscription (e.g., I didn't renew this year because I have multiple AI subscriptions, and Grammarly was the least critical of them). However, for me, the main advantage of Grammarly was the user experience of having mistakes and suggestions inline and just a click away while editing, as well as the quality of the suggestions (with an LLM chat, there's a lot of trial and error and junk you need to filter out). I understand their move, but I wish they had developed a good minimalist native text editor with the same Grammarly suggestions and click-to-correct interface.
- charlie0 1y agoThat is my number one issue with startups. They all start minimalist and end up bloated, some sooner than others, and what made them great disappears behind all this bloat. See: tyranny of the marginal user.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jccalhoun 1y agoThis is getting to the antivirus bundle level of adding pointless features. I want grammarly to... check my grammar. I don't want it to write for me or suggest things.
- torginus 1y agoToo bad, management wants you to train this shitty chatbot they plan to replace you with
- chemotaxis 1y agoPerhaps you do, but I think this misses the point. For-profit writing is the most successful use case for LLMs today. A significant proportion of all the docs I see at work reek of LLMs. A fair amount of articles you read in the media are written by LLMs. Lawyers use it for legal briefs (sometimes with comical results). Doctors use it for patient notes. Basically, a significant portion of the population doesn't like writing or isn't good at it and really wants a "get it done" button. I might not love it, but the market is there. So Grammarly is addressing a very real need. Further, it's really the only way for them to stay relevant, because you're getting AI editing / writing features in Gmail, Docs, Office 365, etc.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 1y ago> So Grammarly is addressing a very real need. Further, it's really the only way for them to stay relevant, because you're getting AI editing / writing features in Gmail, Docs, Office 365, etc. They are a feature, not a company, with my apologies to Jobs. To your point, software and tools with native writing functionality can incorporate their own LLM support, as can native apps on mobile and desktop. Anything local will eventually be on device imho as model efficiency improves, or perhaps in browser (if not making API calls).
- ghaff 1y ago
- Yizahi 1y agoSupercringe
- andai 1y agoSuperhuman is such a funny name. It implies the Red Squiggles feature was the beginning of man-machine symbiosis...
- wahnfrieden 1y agoThey are paying UGC creators $10 per 1000 views. Ambitious.
- zonged 1y agoRecently switched to Harper https://writewithharper.com/ https://writewithharper.com/, a vastly superior grammar checker
- hungryhobbit 1y agoHarper is a nice alternative, but it's still rough around the edges. For instance, if you have a misspelled word, and the correction options come up, you can't get out of them and return to where you were by using the keyboard. You can hit Escape to close them, but it doesn't restore your place in the text field, so you have to use your mouse to get back where you were. As a programmer who tries to use the keyboard as much as possible, this (incredibly easy to fix, I'm sure) bug drives me crazy! Almost enough to make me go back to Grammarly.
- embedding-shape 1y agoThat seems to me not like a "rough around the edges" thing but "most basic, table-stakes feature". If you cannot resume typing after either cancelling a correction, or doing a correction, I'd say it is very broken and not ready to be marketed as a functioning tool. I mean, it's supposed to help you write, not make it more cumbersome.
- saint_yossarian 1y agoI thought Harper is an LSP, so this sounds more like an integration issue with whatever editor you're using it with.
- jerrygoyal 1y agoFor those who find red squiggly lines too distracting, I built a lightweight Chrome extension (<1MB) that approaches grammar correction in a minimalistic way: Highlight text -> Select "Correct grammar" from the toolbar -> Replace text. The quality is unmatched because it uses SOTA models like GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini. Yes, you can use your own API key as well. https://jetwriter.ai https://jetwriter.ai
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- biophysboy 1y agoI get that software companies are rebranding products with superhero/god terminology to increase their perceived value and raise margin, but its not working for me because they are losing product differentiation. Why would I choose this app among the dozens of other tech products that promise godlike AI capabilities?
- yoyohello13 1y agoEven if we haven't hit the LLM ceiling, we've hit a ceiling on branding for sure. I'm interested to see where these names go next. Uberbeing! Omnipotence Plugin!
- dude250711 1y agoThe society is not yet ready to discuss branding ecology. Nice names are a finite resource.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoOfficial post: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/introducing-new-superhuman/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/introducing-new-super...
- faefox 1y agoA great tool if you want your own unique voice to blend seamlessly into the tidal wave of LLM-generated mush flooding the internet.
- port11 1y agoI really like your comment. Of course all the LLM-generated content really is for other LLMs to read/scrape.
- emil-lp 1y agoGrammarly is a powerful writing assistant that offers grammar, punctuation, and style suggestions to improve your writing. It’s an essential tool for maintaining your unique voice in a world filled with generic, LLM-generated content. With Grammarly, you can ensure your words stand out and resonate amidst the noise.
- saaaaaam 1y agoAt the risk of seeming glib, is this AI? Or is it satire?
- terribleperson 11mo agoI think it's satire. Possibly satirical use of AI.
- egorfine 1y agoI absolutely hate it when companies rename themselves. I know a company called an extremely stupid name by its young founder and they did not rename for decades and are now worth a bit short of $4T. Why do the smaller ones constantly need to change their name. Like that changes anything in their substance.
- superbowl 1y agoMoving to "AI" and away from a well-known brand smacks of desperation. Makes me wonder if the industry-wide trend of shoving AI into every product and feature, and channelling all investment into AI, is equally desperate.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoOne day, we will see a demand for services that are the opposite of "Superhuman". For example, a service like: "Deteriorate this text and make it look weirdly human. Add some typos and errors here and there, so that the final output looks 100% human-written."
- coffeebeqn 1y agoThe end state job for all the laid off office workers. A man can dream
- gaws 1y agoStop using Grammarly. There are better options available that don't exist just to collect your data to sell it to the highest bidder or feed it into an LLM.
- JEFFREYBURKE 1y ago[dead]
- chatmasta 1y agoGrammarly is a keylogger. It’s astounding any enterprise allows it to run on their endpoints.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoAnd Microsoft has access to everything written in every word doc and excel spreadsheet and every email Most people apparently don't care
- DLion 1y agoSwitched to https://languagetool.org/ https://languagetool.org/ and I'm super happy about it.
- aetherspawn 1y agoAIs are pretty bad at rewriting, they always pick gimmickey marketing words. I always thought of Grammarly as a premium entry into that segment for proper professional writing. Shame it’s going the way of slop.
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- villgax 1y agoThis stuff happens all the time for a tech blog they sure don’t know the industry. Google acquired Flutter, a desktop app which let you control your music playback with hand gestures, only to reuse the branding for the yet another ghost town framework of theirs.
- ajkjk 1y agoGreat now I will have to keep hearing about their new stupid name instead
- __mharrison__ 1y agoI've been a long time use of Grammarly. I have used it for most of my books. I have a 150 week long streak using it. I've used it as an example of good ux for AI. Now I'm considering vibe coding a replacement that just does grammar fixing... Ironic, because I don't want the AI writing, only the grammar checking
- coffeebeqn 1y agoI’m guessing their moat is pretty much gone. Not too surprised they’re pivoting
- not4uffin 1y agoI don’t like it, but I’m not surprised a writing tool got invaded with LLM features.
- santiagobasulto 1y agoThey rebranded but the pricing and packaging options are still stupid and poorly segmenting the product. Basically, there's still a different (and higher) price to get email or not. On top of that, Grammarly's 3 products (Coda, Go and Grammarly itself) all look the same. What are honestly the differences between these three: * Product 1: Everyone’s favorite AI writing partner. * Product 2: The all-in-one AI workspace for teams * Product 3: AI that works in every app you use These people probably know what they're doing, and probably also have a lot of restrictions from previous users so migrating is hard. But I'd unify the value prop, just one product: AI Superpowers, including all the "features": Email, writing assistant etc. And then the packaging done per Enterprise features and metered.
- Havoc 1y agoOuch. They had perfectly fine - even great - branding and they went with something ambiguous like that?
- cess11 1y agoAfter reading this article I'm still wondering whether they're claiming to be the Übermensch or tailoring their services for them. Either way, I'm not so sure spellchecking and the Superman has the kind of connection that would make for efficient branding.
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y agoThis has to be equivalent of "Long Island Iced Tea Corp" renaming to "Long Blockchain Corp."
- adamzwasserman 1y agogrammerly is a particularly intrusive TSR (showing my age here). So much so, that even though I like it, I will not run it. Superhuman's entire value proposition was "staying out of my way". All I can do is hope that the latter rubs off on the former, and notthe otehr way around.
- animitronix 1y agoExcept there's already a "Superhuman" product on the market. Did they do zero research on a new name? What a blunder
- OhioMan2943 11mo agoThis is horrifically idiotic rebrand- yet another example of optimising for ai at the cost of optimising for everything else