Max and Alex are co-foundings of Grammarly.
It's very simple.
Did your teachers mention that it could make you a billionaire?
A $200 million investment round announced last week by a popular grammar checking tool catapults the company's value to $13 billion, but it also leaves two of its founders billionaires. The Ukrainian-born entrepreneurs, who started the automated writing assistant in 2009, are now worth at least $4 billion each thanks to the recent funding, according to Forbes.
According to data collected by Pitchbook, 22% of Grammarly is owned by investors. A company spokesman previously told Forbes Ukraine that the third co-founder, Lider, held a 1% stake. After taking into account the Forbes discount for private companies, the equity of both Schevchenko and Lytvyn is estimated to be worth $4 billion apiece. The numbers were confirmed by a source.
The company has not provided any evidence to support a different valuation of its co-workers. The communications head of Grammarly said in an email that the company does not reveal ownership distribution or figures.
The San Francisco-based company was launched over a decade ago as a subscription-based product aimed at helping students with their spelling and grammar. It has since evolved away from its focus on education and has opened up access to its intelligence-driven grammar checker, which can be used to easily weed out the errors in emails, documents and more. The company has also released spin-off products, such as the Grammarly for Business edition, which boasts big-name clients such as Dell, and is used for corporate use.
Since 2015, the key product has been available for free under a freemium model, with the option to upgrade for a fee. Brad Hoover, the CEO of Grammarly, told Fast Company that word-of-mouth growth really, really took off after that. The company claims to have reached 30 million people each day through its operations across 500,000 applications and websites, including email apps, numerous web browsers, social media and Microsoft Word.
This isn't the only company that Schevchenko and Lytvyn have started. The pair met while attending the International Christian University in Ukraine, and say the idea for Grammarly came from their previous venture, MyDropBox. In March, the author wrote in a post that they had built a product to help keep plagiarism out of students' writing. Why do people choose to plagiarize in the first place? It could be that they were having trouble communicating what they meant in their own voice.
The mission may sound noble, but there were some questions raised about the motives of the two men who launched the two online services that helped professors check student papers for plagiarism. They told The Chronicle of Higher Education that they had been hired to program a paper-mill site, but denied any connection between the two businesses. Shevchenko told the publication in 2002 that they never sold any papers uploaded to their service.
The scandal faded into an almost forgotten blip on their records when they moved to the U.S. and Canada to get their masters degrees. They brought to life their vision for MyDropBox, which was eventually acquired by the company. It's not clear if the two men have gained citizenship in the US or Canada, but one or both of them may still be living in the city. There are offices in San Francisco, Canada and Ukranian.
The company raised $90 million from investors before the most recent round. The round was led by General Catalyst. The new funding brought on new investors, including Baillie Gifford, according to the CEO.
Additional reporting by Matt.
