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By Aman Kidwai
Workplaces Editor
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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 "AI superhighway" that Grammarly created to leverage other data and information beyond spelling and syntax rules to users while they are communicating in various apps.
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"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."
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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.
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.
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"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."
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