Grammarly acquires Superhuman

Zawinski's law strikes again

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
~ Zawinski’s law

Image source: Grammarly blog

In case you haven’t heard yet, Grammarly (the OG writing assistant) has acquired Superhuman, a privacy focused niche email client. Last year, they acquired Coda, a documentation tool as powerful as an app.

Grammarly already has access to the omnipresent blinking cursor via its app and Chrome extension. This gives it context about everything on your screen. And as the popular adage goes, context is all you need in the AI world.

Grammarly’s strategy reminds me of Notion. Both are building their productivity suites through acquisitions. Notion acquired Cron, which became Notion Calendar. They acquired Skiff, which became Notion Mail.

Every software company wants to create the ultimate productivity suite, replacing Google or Microsoft. Each of these started with a single productivity use case, doubled down on it and solved it very well, then expanded to other use cases.

Look at Zoom’s offerings. They’re synonymous with video conferencing, but now offer products for the entire productivity suite: docs, calendars, mail clients, task management, screen recording, whiteboarding, and much more.

For Grammarly, it’s about staying relevant in the AI world, and the fact that they were flush with funding allowed them to go on an acquisition spree.

The game is still platformization. Only the narrative has changed to an AI native workspace.

Curious to see how this acquisition pans out. Only time will tell.

P.S. If you want to read more about the Coda acquisition and platformization, head here: