Grammarly Acquiring Coda; Coda CEO to Lead Company

Grammarly is acquiring productivity platform Coda, with the latter’s CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, to lead the combined company.

Grammarly is one of the leading platforms for writers and professionals to check their work, correct mistakes, and receive suggestions on how to improve their writing. The platform has increasingly incorporated AI, making it a powerful tool for professional and novice writers alike.

Meanwhile, Coda is an all-in-one platform that combines documents, spreadsheets, applications, databases, and team communication, as well as an AI assistant that can handle much of a team’s “busywork.”

Mehrotra says the combination of the two companies will dramatically accelerate Coda’s mission.

This represents an opportunity for dramatic acceleration of the Coda product and our mission. For the tens of thousands of teams that rely on Coda docs every day, you can count on those docs to continue working as they do now, and you’ll see fast innovation as we supercharge them with our joint AI roadmap.

Mehrotra says a shared vision of a future where AI-powered productivity suite’s are the norm.

As I watched the foundational capabilities of AI change how just about every tool and surface operates, I started drafting my 2025 planning memo for the team. I titled it “the AI-native productivity suite.”

I shared this memo with my close advisors, and one of them suggested that I connect with the Grammarly team. I asked for more context, but they said, “Just trust me, you’ll have a lot more to talk about than you think.” So Coda co-founder Alex DeNeui and I spent a full day with the Grammarly leaders. It was one of the most fun meetings I’ve been a part of — a day full of brainstorming and ideas, lots of head nodding, and more than a few high-fives.

I also learned a lot about Grammarly. With 40 million active users, Grammarly is actually the original AI assistant, one that’s provided AI-powered suggestions to users for the past 15 years. Beyond being an incredibly smart assistant, Grammarly seamlessly blends with your existing tools and works with over 500,000 applications and websites to provide meaningful assistance directly inline, wherever you’re working. While the Coda team has been busy redefining a new blinking cursor, the Grammarly team has been busy making every existing blinking cursor much smarter. But most excitingly, the Grammarly leaders shared their future vision for Grammarly with me — and the resemblance to my Coda vision memo was extraordinary.

Once discussions between the two companies began, both parties realized they had much to offer each other, and could accelerate their development by combining forces.

We discussed each of our paths to achieving this vision, and while both teams felt confident in their paths, it was obvious that we would move much faster together. The way that each of us has approached this market is different but inherently complementary. And so the conversation became… “What if we merged the companies?”

Over the next few days, through discussions with Grammarly CEO (Rahul Roy-Chowdhury) and the co-founders (Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko) we started sketching out what a combined company would feel like: how the teams would fit together, where the products could immediately integrate and amplify, etc. And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO.

With a round of sushi and some sake, we shook hands — excited to work together on the future of AI.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, the combined teams will be working to improve Grammarly, making it even “smarter” and “more helpful” by using Coda Brain to help the writing assistant better understand context, and be able to tap into a user’s other documents and assets to provide additional insights.

The teams will also be combining Grammarly with Coda Docs, giving users more flexibility in how they work and manage their documents and projects.

While many mergers often result in a popular product or platform losing much of its appeal as it’s cannibalized by the buyer, the merge of Coda and Grammarly looks poised to be one of those rare mergers where the end result will be a stronger product that benefits customers of both platforms.

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