Latest news with #ShishirMehrotra
Canada News.Net
04-07-2025
- Business
- Canada News.Net
Grammarly pushes into email AI with Superhuman acquisition
SAN FRANCISCO, California: Grammarly is doubling down on AI-powered productivity tools with the acquisition of Superhuman, a sleek email startup known for its speed-focused interface and loyal user base. The move marks Grammarly's latest step in building a comprehensive platform for professionals, expanding beyond its roots in grammar correction. The San Francisco-based companies declined to share the financial terms of the deal. Superhuman, once famous for its invite-only exclusivity, was last valued at US$825 million in 2021 and currently brings in about $35 million in annual revenue. Grammarly's acquisition follows a $1 billion investment round led by General Catalyst, giving the company fresh capital to assemble a suite of workplace tools powered by artificial intelligence. Founded in 2009, Grammarly now boasts over 40 million daily users and more than $700 million in yearly revenue. A name change is also being worked on as it aims to rebrand around its expanding capabilities. Superhuman has raised over $110 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and IVP. Its focus has been on reimagining email for speed and efficiency, with a growing emphasis on AI. The company claims that its users send and respond to 72 percent more emails per hour, and that AI-generated emails on its platform have increased fivefold over the past year. "Email continues to be the dominant communication tool for the world. Professionals spend something like three hours a day in their inboxes. It's by far the most used work app, foundational to any productivity suite," said Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra. "Superhuman is the obvious leading innovator in the space." Grammarly previously acquired startup Coda, which laid the groundwork for building AI agents to assist with research, analysis, and collaboration. Email, Mehrotra said—who also co-founded Coda—was a natural next frontier. Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and more than 100 employees will join Grammarly as part of the acquisition. "The Superhuman product, team, and brand will continue," Mehrotra confirmed. "It's a very well-used product by tens of thousands of people, and we want to see them continue to make progress." Vohra said joining forces with Grammarly will give Superhuman "significantly greater resources" to deepen its AI features and broaden its offerings to include calendars, task management, and other collaborative tools. Both companies see the integration of Grammarly's AI agents into Superhuman as a significant opportunity, especially for serving enterprise users. The vision is to create a network of intelligent agents that can seamlessly access and process data across documents and emails, helping users reduce time spent searching for information or writing responses.
Newsweek
03-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Grammarly Acquired Superhuman to Continue Developing an AI Productivity Suite
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Grammarly, originally a spell-check app, announced the acquisition of Superhuman, an AI-powered email platform, on Tuesday. Email is the most prevalent use case for Grammarly to date, creating an interesting alignment between the two companies. "This felt like peas in a pod," Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra told Newsweek. "I had a view on why we could reinvent documents, and [Superhuman founder/CEO Rahul Vohra] had a view on why he could reinvent email." This acquisition comes in the wake of Grammarly's acquisition of Mehrotra's company Coda at the end of last year, and Mehrotra's appointment as CEO of the combined company. In a previous interview with Newsweek, Mehrotra shared his vision to take Grammarly, which he called "the OG agent," to become the "blinking cursor of choice" with Coda, and use the "information superhighway" that Grammarly created to leverage other data and information beyond spelling and syntax rules to users while they are communicating in various apps. "Grammarly is an AI superhighway, and we're going to open it up so many agents can work on it," Mehrotra said. "That was the main theory behind the Coda acquisition, giving a natural writing home for users to work with all their agents. As we went looking for the next part of the suite, email is sort of the obvious place to go." Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra on stage at the Human X conference. Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra on stage at the Human X conference. Getty Images With Superhuman in the fold, Grammarly adds tens of thousands of AI-familiar users in an area where most office workers are spending a lot of time. A 2023 Microsoft study found that the top quartile of its users spent 8.8 hours per week on email, and Gartner estimates that there are one billion knowledge workers around the globe, including 100 million in the United States. Superhuman does not publish user data, and terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Before founding Superhuman, Vohra sold his previous company, Rapportive, another email app, to LinkedIn for a reported $15 million, four years after launching it. Grammarly reached a $13 billion valuation as of 2021, claims more than 40 million daily active users and is profitable with annual revenue over $700 million. Coda, which it acquired in December 2024, was founded in 2014, reached unicorn valuation by 2021 and had over 10,000 enterprise customers by 2024. Superhuman was valued at $825 million in its latest funding round, also in 2021. "Billions of emails are sent every single day," Mehrotra said. "We currently support something like 50 million emails per week, and we work across 20 different email providers, including Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and, of course, Superhuman." Mehrotra has a deep history with email, having worked on an early version of Outlook while at Microsoft in the early 2000s. He was also quite familiar with Superhuman and its founder, Rahul Vohra, who told Newsweek they first met at a tech conference in Hawaii in 2017. Vohra shared that he ran a poolside demo of Superhuman and onboarded him on the email tool right there. "It was one of those special moments when nobody else was around, and you had two productivity nerds, nerding out about productivity," Vohra said. In that 2017 meeting, Vohra said that Mehrotra delivered "the best product demo I'd seen in years" of the software that would eventually be called Coda. "It's a document, it's a spreadsheet, database, collaboration tool, also a mini app builder." From that meeting, the two stayed in touch. When Vohra saw the announcement that Grammarly was acquiring Coda and Mehrotra would be CEO, he said his "jaw figuratively dropped," when he read that Mehrotra had titled his 2025 plan "AI Productivity Suite." "At Superhuman our vision has always been to build what we also call an AI native productivity suite," Vohra said. He got in touch with Mehrotra near the time of the Grammarly-Coda acquisition and "over several conversations, it became very clear that we share the same vision, which is to build the AI-native productivity suite of choice." Mehrotra has been a loyal user of Superhuman since that 2017 meeting, sharing that he's more responsive to the hundreds of daily emails he receives and currently riding a 144-week "inbox-zero" streak, which he largely attributes to Superhuman. He is deeply familiar with the product and its potential. "We just started brainstorming on what it would feel like to put those products together. I think it's a very natural place for our multi-agent experience," Mehrotra said. "The number two, three and four players behind Superhuman are much, much smaller. So it was definitely the dominant new player in the space." Over the last few months, the former YouTube chief technology officer has been integrating Coda with Grammarly. In time, the new combined company, including Superhuman, will also have a new name. This past May, Grammarly announced a $1 billion investment from the VC firm General Catalyst to advance the mission of building an AI-powered productivity platform. It's possible that other acquisitions are coming down the road. "We're clearly building a broad suite. The document surface and the email surface are two of the most important parts of that suite," Mehrotra shared. "But there's clearly more that we'll do. Some of that we'll build internally, some of that we'll partner, and some of that we'll continue to find the right opportunistic positions." Mehrotra shared his vision for the AI productivity suite, organized with the approach of a "compound startup," a recently popular term in Silicon Valley which has business units operating like a collection of startups. Superhuman founder/CEO Rahul Vohra speaking at a 2025 conference. Superhuman founder/CEO Rahul Vohra speaking at a 2025 conference. Getty Images "We're building this AI-data productivity suite, and I'd like each of the products in the in that suite to act a little bit like fast-running startups," Mehrotra said, sharing that the model for Google after the acquisition of YouTube, running it as an independent company with much greater resources, serves as an example he's experienced where this approach succeeded. Vohra is staying on with the new company, where his goal will be to build and advance Superhuman, he says, not so different from what it was before the acquisition, except now they have more money and business partners. "It's really important that the team that's innovating on email really needs to stay focused on innovating on email," Mehrotra said. "We're gonna fund what they're working on now, as well as a few ambitious new projects that they've been putting off, and let them go after that as fast as possible, sort of similar to what we've done with the Coda Doc's team." Legacy productivity software providers for tools like email, documents or spreadsheets, such as Microsoft or Google, are firmly entrenched in the workplace, with Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint being required skills for nearly any office job. Mehrotra and Vohra say their AI-native software and platform are capable of accelerating workplace innovation. "The view was these [legacy] suites are unassailable, nobody's going to switch what they use for documents or emails, that's clearly not true," Mehrotra said. "Between Coda, Superhuman, and a variety of other products, it's pretty obvious that users are ready for change. I think at this point, the Microsoft suite and the Google suite are trying to respond to that."
Reuters
03-07-2025
- Business
- Reuters
More AI bots, less human visits on the internet
July 3 (Reuters) - This was originally published in the Artificial Intelligencer newsletter, which is issued every Wednesday. Sign up here to learn about the latest breakthroughs in AI and tech. Professionals spend, on average, three hours a day in their inboxes. That single statistic, which Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra shared with me in my exclusive story on their latest move, is the key to understanding his company's acquisition of email tool Superhuman. The vision, he explained, is to build a network of specialized AI agents that can pull data from across your private digital workflow—emails, documents, calendars—to reduce the time you spend searching for information or crafting responses. This vision of a helpful AI agent, however, isn't just about getting to inbox zero. It's a preview of a much larger, more disruptive shift happening across the entire web. Scroll down for more on that. Do you experience this shift in your work or daily use of the internet already? Email me here, opens new tab or follow me on LinkedIn, opens new tab to share any feedback, and what you want to read about next in AI. Read our latest reporting in tech & AI * Exclusive-Intel's new CEO explores big shift in chip manufacturing business * Exclusive-Scale AI's bigger rival Surge AI seeks up to $1 billion capital raise, sources say * Grammarly to acquire email startup Superhuman in AI platform push * Meta deepens AI push with 'Superintelligence' lab, source says * Asia is a formidable force in the AI race. Register, opens new tab to watch the live broadcast of the #ReutersNEXTAsia, opens new tab summit on July 9 to hear from executives and experts on the ground about what digital transformation looks like there. A new internet with more AI bots than humans For decades, the internet worked like this: Google indexed millions of web pages, ranked them and showed them on search results. We'd click through to individual websites—Reuters, the New York Times, Pinterest, Reddit, you name it. Those sites then sold our attention to advertisers, earning more ad dollars or subscription fees for producing high-quality, engaging or unique content you couldn't get anywhere else. Now, AI companies are pitching a new way to deliver information: everything you want, inside a chat window. Imagine your chatbot answering any question by scraping info from across the web—without ever having to click back to the original source. That's what some AI companies are pitching as a more 'optimized' web experience, except that the people creating the content will get left behind. In this new online world, as envisioned by AI companies like OpenAI, navigating the web would be frictionless. Users will no longer bother with clicking links or juggling tabs. Instead, everything happens through chat, while personal AI agents will do the dirty work of browsing the internet, performing tasks, and making decisions like comparing plane tickets on your behalf. So-called 'agents' refer to autonomous AI tools that act on a user's instructions, fetching information and interacting with websites. The shift is happening fast, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network that oversees about 20% of web traffic. It started to hear complaints from publishers like news websites about plunging referral traffic in the past few months. The data pointed to one trend: more bot activity, less human visits, and lower ad revenue. Bots have long been an integral part of the internet—there are good bots that crawl and index websites and help them get discovered and recommended when users search for relevant services or information. Bad bots are usually the ones that could overwhelm websites with traffic to cause crashes. And then there is a new category of AI bots made for large language models (LLMs). AI companies send them to scrape websites using automated programs to copy vast amounts of online information. The volume of such bot activity has risen 125% in just six months, according to Webflow data. The first wave of AI data scraping hit books and archives. Now, there's a push for real-time access, putting content owners on the internet in the crosshairs, because chatbot users want information about both history and current events—and they want it to be accurate without hallucinations. This demand has sparked a wave of partnerships and lawsuits between AI companies and media companies. OpenAI is signing on more news sources while Perplexity is trying to build out a publisher program that was met with little fanfare. Reddit sued Anthropic over data scraping, even as it inked a $60 million deal with Google to license its content. AI companies argue that web crawling isn't illegal. They say they're optimizing the user experience, and that they'll try to offer links to the original sources when they aggregate information. Website owners are experimenting, too. Cloudflare's new 'block or pay' crawler model, launched Tuesday, is a new model that already gained support from dozens of websites, from Condé Nast to Reddit. It's a novel attempt to charge for the use of content by 'per crawl', although it's too early to tell whether publishers would be made whole by the loss of human visitors. Chart of the week Data from Cloudflare reveals how drastically the web has shifted in just six months. The number of pages crawled per visitor referred has risen sharply—especially among AI companies. Anthropic now sends its bot to scrape 60,000 times for every single visitor it refers back to a website. For site owners who monetize human attention, this presents real challenges. And for those hoping to have their brands or services featured in AI chatbot responses, there's growing pressure to build "bot-friendly" websites—optimized not for humans, but for machines, according to Webflow CEO Linda Tong. What AI researchers are reading A study from MIT Media Lab, 'Your Brain on ChatGPT, opens new tab,' digs into what really happens in our heads when we write essays using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Search, or just our own brainpower. The research team recruited university students and split them into three groups: one could only use ChatGPT, another used traditional search engines like Google (no AI answers allowed), and a third had to rely on memory alone. The findings are striking. Writing without any digital tools led to the strongest and most widespread brain connectivity, especially in regions associated with memory, creativity, and executive function. The 'Search Engine' group showed intermediate engagement—more than the LLM group, but less than brain-only—while those using ChatGPT exhibited the weakest neural coupling. In other words, the more we outsource to AI, the less our brains are forced to work. But the story doesn't end there. Participants who used LLMs not only had less brain engagement but also struggled to remember or quote from their own essays just minutes after writing. They reported a weaker sense of ownership over their work, and their essays tended to be more homogeneous in style and content. In contrast, those who wrote unaided or used search engines felt more attached to their writing and were better able to recall and accurately quote what they'd written. Interestingly, when participants switched tools—going from LLM to brain-only or vice versa—the neural patterns didn't fully reset. Prior reliance on AI seemed to leave a trace, resulting in less coordinated brain effort when writing unaided. The researchers warn that frequent LLM use may lead to an 'accumulation of cognitive debt'—a kind of atrophy of the mental muscles needed for deep engagement, memory and authentic authorship. The takeaway? Use AI tools wisely, but don't let them do all the thinking for you—or you might find your own voice, and memory, fading into the background. AI jargon you need to know Imagine if every device required a unique charging cable. AI has faced a similar challenge, where each external tool—like calendars or email—needed custom-built connections, making it slow and complex. Introducing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a new standard from Anthropic that's gaining traction with major players like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It serves as a universal adapter for AI models, enabling seamless communication with diverse tools and data. This means AIs can better manage tasks, integrate with apps, and access real-time information. MCP is vital for the rise of autonomous AI agents because it eliminates custom integrations, paving the way for more integrated and helpful AI in our daily lives. LLM, NLP, RLHF: What's a jargon term you'd like to see defined? Email me, opens new tab and I might feature the suggestion in an upcoming edition.
Time of India
02-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Grammarly acquires Superhuman as part of plan to become an ‘AI productivity platform'
Grammarly has announced its plans to acquire the AI-based email app Superhuman. This acquisition aims to provide Grammarly with its email platform to feature its product. Superhuman helps users respond one to two days faster and save four hours every week on their email communications. Grammarly stated that email is currently its 'number-one use case' for professional users, with its AI assistant helping to revise over 50 million emails per week across more than 20 email providers. The acquisition of Superhuman, a popular email platform, aligns with Grammarly's strategy to enhance its offerings within this primary use case. Grammarly also has wider goals that, similar to many other tech companies, centre around AI, particularly AI agents . What Grammarly said about acquiring Superhuman With this acquisition, Grammarly is planning to build a productivity platform with AI agents, aiming to streamline workflows across 500,000+ apps and websites. Commenting on the acquisition announcement, Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly, said: 'This is the future we've been building toward since day one: AI that works where people work, not where companies want them to work. With Superhuman, we can deliver that future to millions more professionals while giving our existing users another surface for agent collaboration that simply doesn't exist anywhere else. Email isn't just another app; it's where professionals spend significant portions of their day, and it's the perfect staging ground for orchestrating multiple AI agents simultaneously.' by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like If you have a mouse, play this game for 1 minute Navy Quest Undo Superhuman is used by 94% of its weekly active users for AI features, and Grammarly's plans to acquire the platform mark a step toward building an AI-powered workspace. Superhuman users already send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the platform aims to enhance this further with AI agents that can manage inboxes, schedule meetings, conduct research, and write emails in a user's voice. These agents will use context, reasoning, and system interaction to boost professional productivity . Grammarly's research shows growing interest in agentic AI, with professionals ready for AI to autonomously manage tasks like admin support (44%), collaboration (39%), and strategic communication (36%). Two-thirds of users expect AI to triple productivity in five years, while industry leaders foresee a 10x jump. Grammarly's acquisitions of Superhuman and Coda support its vision of building a multi-agent productivity platform, where apps function as intelligent collaborators. Email, where professionals spend over three hours daily, is seen as the ideal setting for deploying these AI agents. Future use cases include multiple agents assisting simultaneously—handling grammar, verifying facts, adding context, and refining messaging. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Time of India
02-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Why language hygiene site Grammarly is going beyond grammar checks to agentic AI
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Language hygiene site Grammarly has signed a deal to acquire email efficiency tool its website, Grammarly said that email is the 'number-one use case' for professionals, with the AI assistant being used to revise over 50 million emails each week across different email platforms."Superhuman is the obvious leading innovator in the space," said Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly, adding that its acquisition therefore makes that isn't Grammarly's only intent. This acquisition is part of the company's broader push into AI and its move to enter the highly crowded and competitive has become the central communication surface in the company's vision for an agentic future, where humans and AI work together, Grammarly company is particularly interested in agentic AI . A study by Grammarly claimed that 'workers are ready for agentic AI'.The company said that this 'future platform' will provide users with multiple agents that can work simultaneously. For example, it said, while drafting a customer memo, Grammarly's communication agent could handle spelling and grammar, a sales agent could check facts, a support agent could add recent issue context, and a marketing agent could refine feature positioning.'This is the future we've been building toward since day one: AI that works where people work, not where companies want them to work,' said it is yet to be seen if Grammarly can catch up with giants in the space, such as Sam Altman's OpenAI, which also has similar ambitions.
