Grammarly is acquiring Coda to define a new era of AI-native productivity
Here’s a look at Coda’s next chapter.
Shishir Mehrotra
CEO
Grammarly is acquiring Coda to define a new era of AI-native productivity
By Shishir Mehrotra
Share this article
Blog > About Coda · 6 min read
Coda is merging with Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for communication and productivity. Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future. And I’m honored to lead the combined companies as CEO.
From different beginnings to the same destination: A unified, AI-powered future
First, a bit of context on how this happened. I spent much of the last few months excitedly working on defining the future of Coda. Since launching Coda 1.0 in 2019, it’s been incredible to see how millions of makers and tens of thousands of teams have embraced Coda as their go-to productivity tool. Through the years, we built (and re-built) the core writing editor, layered it into an all-in-one container, added interactive reactions and controls, shaped powerful tables with flexible views, rethought formulas to reach past spreadsheets to databases, and provided the platform for an ecosystem full of templates and Packs. Along the way, like many others, I caught the AI bug. We launched our first set of AI features in 2023, and more recently, we have been hard at work on Coda Brain — our new AI assistant. Coda Brain runs on top of our broad array of 800+ privacy-aware integrations to provide individuals with a personal “know-it-all” to make them and their teams more productive. 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. Both companies had arrived at a similar view of the future where AI will redefine every business application and workflow — and reinvent productivity as we know it today into a place where humans and AI work together everywhere you get work done. We want to rethink a suite of tools and come together to provide users and teams with their own AI productivity platform for apps and agents. 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.Looking ahead: What to expect in the short term, and a glimpse into the longer term
Much of what we want to do together will become clearer over time, but I wanted to give a bit of a glimpse of what it means for Coda and Grammarly to redefine the AI-native productivity space. In the near term, we’ll be focused on a few things. First, if you think of Grammarly as one of the world’s most ubiquitous AI Assistants, we’ll be working on making this Assistant even “smarter” and “more helpful” by adding the context of Coda Brain. Imagine if the Assistant not only gave amazing suggestions and refinements based on the writing it sees today but also had permission-aware connections into all of your other systems (from your email to docs to CRM to project trackers and more). Second, we’ll be working on unifying Coda Docs and the Grammarly Assistant to provide users with a flexible home to work. The Coda Docs you know and love will continue to work as they do now but will get supercharged with the Grammarly Assistant seamlessly blended through the experience. And Grammarly’s ubiquitous Assistant will continue to provide immense value in every surface you work on, but now your work will also have a natural AI-native home. In the longer term, we plan to weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together. It will combine your company knowledge, generative AI chat features, a full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents to help you work smarter. We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era.A moment of reflection
My wife asked me how to think about this — is it a beginning, an end, something in between? I told her that it felt like a clear chapter mark: the end of chapter one. A fantastic opening act behind us, but with many chapters to be written in front of us. I want to give an enormous thank you to our remarkable team of Codans, as well as our investors, friends, and family members for the support you’ve given to make Coda what it is today. Over the past decade, we’ve worked together to evolve how people think about the blinking cursor. We’ve given makers a place to collaborate, and we’ve helped them reinvent their team rituals. We’ve helped many companies like Figma, Qualtrics, the New York Times, Tonal, TED, Snap, etc, change how they operate. We’ve empowered millions of users, from students to professionals, to work on a new surface that allows them to craft their tools to work in their way. To my new teammates at Grammarly (the Grammarlians!), first a huge note of gratitude — your dedication to Grammarly’s mission is evident in everything you do. Having spent time with a few of you, I’m excited to see the similarities between our values and culture. And I’m looking forward to bringing our teams closer together. And to Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, thank you for being Grammarly’s thoughtful CEO and steward for the past few years and for trusting me to carry the mission forward. I’m also incredibly grateful to have you as an advisor as we work through the transition. To the Coda community, I hope you are as excited about this next chapter as I am. You should know that as I reflect on the past few years, it was so often the highlight of my week to hear about something you’ve built and your enthusiasm around how it transformed your team’s rituals. Please keep pushing the boundaries of what Coda can do. Stay tuned for what we’re doing next!Related posts
Explore more stories about Coda.