Grammarly has acquired Superhuman, the high-speed email client once known for its exclusivity and $350-a-year subscription, as part of its strategy to expand into AI-native productivity software. The acquisition brings Superhuman’s 100-person team including founder and CEO Rahul Vohra into Grammarly, along with a product that has long been celebrated for its speed, elegance, and focus on professional email workflows.
The deal significantly expands Grammarly’s surface area beyond writing assistance, adding a native email interface that already serves tens of thousands of power users. Grammarly, best known for its writing tools, currently operates at a much broader scale serving more than 40 million daily active users and running across 500,000 applications. With Superhuman, Grammarly adds one of the most time-consuming and mission-critical work applications to its AI-native suite.
A Relationship Years in the Making
The roots of the acquisition stretch back to 2017, when Vohra and Shishir Mehrotra, then CEO of Coda and now CEO of Grammarly, met at a productivity conference in Hawaii. As Vohra recounts, the two struck up a conversation by the pool, bonding over their mutual passion for building better work tools. Mehrotra, who had worked on Outlook during his early career at Microsoft, was intrigued by the direction Superhuman was taking. Vohra, in turn, was impressed by Mehrotra’s early demo of what was then called Krypton—later rebranded as Coda, a document platform that merges text, spreadsheets, databases, and apps into one collaborative surface.
That initial connection turned into an enduring professional relationship. When Mehrotra joined Grammarly as CEO following the acquisition of Coda in 2023, he began charting a bold new direction for the company: to evolve Grammarly from a single application into a platform of AI agents embedded across key productivity surfaces. Email, unsurprisingly, became an immediate focus.
il that professionals use most. Whether that’s enough to build an agent-powered productivity suite remains to be seen, but the building blocks are in place.
“Email isn’t just another app,” Mehrotra said. “It’s the perfect staging ground for orchestrating multiple AI agents simultaneously.”
Email, The First and Most Important Surface
“Professionals spend something like three hours a day in their inboxes,” Mehrotra told Reuters. “It’s by far the most used work app, foundational to any productivity suite.”
The numbers reinforce that claim. Grammarly currently revises over 50 million emails every week. Email is the number one Grammarly use case, and according to the company, 17% of all accepted word suggestions occur within email clients.
Superhuman, with its sharp focus on optimizing the email experience, had already built deep traction in that space. Launched in 2017, the company was one of the few to take on Gmail and Outlook head-on. Its core promise: speed, clarity, and precision. The interface is fast, minimalist, and engineered for professionals who live in their inboxes. At its peak, Superhuman was valued at $825 million and had raised over $110 million from top-tier venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, and Tiger Global. It reports approximately $35 million in annual recurring revenue and a user base of around 100,000.
But maintaining pace in a category dominated by tech giants required more than a great UI—it required platform-scale resources and AI infrastructure. The acquisition gives Superhuman that and more.
Building the AI-Native Suite
Grammarly’s current strategic direction centers around building what Mehrotra calls the “AI-native productivity suite.” The idea is to move beyond assistive features like sentence suggestions and into fully functional AI agents that can reason, act, and collaborate across work surfaces. Mehrotra describes this as building the “AI superhighway,” with Grammarly’s embedded technology acting as the infrastructure layer that delivers AI where users are already working.
Until recently, the company’s reach extended largely through browser extensions and integrations across writing apps like Google Docs and email clients like Gmail and Outlook. But with the acquisitions of Coda and now Superhuman, Grammarly is building its own tightly controlled work surfaces spaces where it can directly implement multi-agent functionality and deliver more complex AI experiences.
For example, future versions of Superhuman are expected to include AI agents that can:
- Triage inboxes before users wake up
- Draft replies in the user’s voice and tone
- Surface contextual information from across calendars, documents, and CRM systems
- Coordinate across agents to schedule meetings, annotate customer feedback, and even build presentations
Vohra offered one real-world scenario already in use: When Superhuman launches a new feature, he emails all users personally. Thousands of replies come in. What used to take 30 minutes of copy-pasting feedback into slides now takes 10 seconds using Superhuman’s AI-powered search. A query like “What are the top 10 most positive responses to the calendar rollout?” yields immediate results. Soon, the product will let users continue the thread, turn feedback into a slide deck, and schedule calendar time to practice—all through AI-driven collaboration.
“It’s not just one assistant helping you,” Vohra said. “It’s multiple agents working across your tools.”
Complementing Strengths, Shared Vision
Both companies had been circling similar territory for years. Vohra described his reaction to Mehrotra’s internal 2025 memo, which was titled The AI-Native Productivity Suite. “This just set a whole bunch of bells off in my brain,” he said. “Superhuman’s vision has always been to build the AI-native productivity suite of choice. Email is obviously a critical part of that.”
For Grammarly, Superhuman offers a clean, extensible interface to deploy agents into. For Superhuman, Grammarly provides the backend infrastructure, model access, and scale to realize its long-held ambitions—moving beyond email into calendars, task management, and more.
The integration will be deliberate. Superhuman will continue to develop its core product while investing heavily in AI features. According to Vohra, 94% of weekly active users now engage with Superhuman’s AI tools, and usage has grown fivefold over the past year.
With Grammarly’s backing, the roadmap includes deeper AI assistance, context-sharing across platforms, and eventually new surfaces of work that go beyond traditional email clients.
Moving Beyond Assistants to Agents
What sets Grammarly’s approach apart from competitors like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is its framing of AI not as assistants that wait for instructions, but as autonomous agents that anticipate needs, interact with other tools, and execute tasks on behalf of the user.
“Email isn’t just another app,” Mehrotra said. “It’s the perfect staging ground for orchestrating multiple AI agents simultaneously.”
Where other platforms are retrofitting generative AI onto legacy systems, Grammarly is attempting a ground-up rebuild. With Coda, it controls the modern document surface. With Superhuman, it now owns the communication layer. The goal is not to compete head-on with Microsoft or Google on every front, but to create a natively integrated, agent-powered system optimized for modern workflows.
