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After Grammarly announced plans to acquire Coda this past December, the former YouTube CTO, who started Coda in 2019, is taking over the combined company.
A curious merger was announced at the end of last year as Grammarly, the spell-check tool, acquired Coda, the document writing and sharing software, and Coda's CEO assumed leadership of the combined organization.
"We got introduced through a common investor," Shishir Mehrotra, the new CEO of Grammarly, told Newsweek. In a sit-down interview, the former Google executive and cofounder of Coda shared his philosophies on agentic AI and the future of work. He also shared how he ended up as the CEO after a company in a seemingly different industry acquired his company.
"At first it wasn't quite obvious, but I ended up spending a day together with [Grammarly leadership], and by the end of that day, it was really obvious how meshed the companies were," Mehrotra said. It was "a day full of brainstorming and ideas, lots of head nodding and more than a few high-fives," he wrote in December.
"We ended up coming up with our view of what the future of an AI-native productivity platform would look like," Mehrotra told Newsweek. "In particular, this idea of agents and applications."
Grammarly's previous CEO, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, was a colleague of Mehrotra's at Google, where he was a vice president of product. Before taking over as CEO of Grammarly in May 2023, he was the company's global head of product for two years. The previous CEO Brad Hoover had been at the helm from 2011–2023, when the company first announced generative AI features.
"It's an underestimated business," Mehrotra said, noting its 40 million daily active users and $700 million in revenue. "It's a much larger business than many people think."
He relayed that at the time Grammarly was looking to build a document platform and "in that process, they were about to rebuild Coda." They took the opportunity to acquire Coda to get a head start on gaining traction as a "blinking cursor of choice" for users, as Mehrotra said. Coda boasts millions of users across 50,000 teams.
The acquisition also brought them a new CEO. The former chief product officer at YouTube, and later its chief technology officer, Mehrotra founded Coda in 2019, and the company reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2021. It counts among its clients The New York Times, Snap Inc., Amazon, the Baltimore Ravens and the Sphere entertainment center in Las Vegas.
"Shishir, as a founder and product visionary, has always been inspiring," Alex Shevchenko, board member and cofounder of Grammarly, told Newsweek via email. "When we compared notes on the future of productivity during our acquisition conversations, it was remarkable how much our visions aligned. Shishir's unique mix of working on applications and platforms in B2C and B2B businesses, shaping and leading forward-thinking product teams and alignment with our vision of the future of AI made him the right choice to lead Grammarly and bring our vision to fruition."
Grammarly was worth over $13 billion as of 2021. The acquisition announcement did not disclose the cost of the purchase.
The thesis of the combination of these companies rests on the fact that Grammarly was one of the first agentic tools to become widely used. The strategy going forward is to identify new ways to get other information, advice and support to users in the same way that Grammarly provided guidance on spelling and syntax, natively, on any website or app.
"The way we think about it is, Grammarly is the OG agent," Mehrotra said. "It lives right alongside you and helps you with your communication."
Coda developed an AI copilot called Coda Brain alongside its core Coda Docs offering, which connects to a wide range of integrated software, such as Slack, email or CRM. The core document service is known for blending spreadsheets, presentations and applications to build "a doc as powerful as an app," Mehrotra explained.
He named Google Docs, Notion, Confluence and Airtable among his competitors. The vision is for documents with capabilities delivered in the style of Grammarly but with new skills included.
"These are the two parts we put together: Grammarly going from an agent to an agent platform and then building the AI-first document surface for everybody," Mehrotra said.
With the added capabilities of Grammarly, and the user base of an existing document suite from Coda, the new combined company is looking to make a dent in AI-powered collaboration at work.
"The core technology [of Grammarly] has very little to do with grammar," Mehrotra said. "It's the ability to run an AI agent right on the edge, right next to the user. We validated about 500,000 different websites, desktop applications, mobile applications, where we can, alongside you, annotate and take action, with your consent."
Mehrotra said they're calling that capability the AI superhighway—the ability to alter, compose and accentuate text in a document, using existing datasets or rules—and that the potential for the future is to bring more types of knowledge, beyond just grammar, to the user.
"Our observation was we're only running one car on that highway, the one with the grammar teacher in it. ... The first part of our discussion was, What would it feel like if we ran many cars?"
The vision is that in addition to the "grammar agent," the new combined Coda and Grammarly can bring many agents into the fold and help employees quickly pull product information, customer service or payment history and external financial information as well as guidance on how to coach an employee or write a difficult email. Mehrotra said that the integrations with hundreds of applications are all being turned into agents.
"The core idea is that your Grammarly would just be smarter, connected to all the rest of your applications and systems, your email, CRM and background information on people you're meeting," he explained.
Mehrotra also discussed the possibility of using a variety of software and services to build agents for the new Grammarly offering, such as Duolingo.
"Imagine what Duolingo looks like in agent form," Mehrotra offered. "For almost every application, every data source or destination, if you could carry it with you, what would it do?"
The possibilities include many forms of support for employees.
"Maybe it's just assistance, maybe it's interactive, and it's in the middle of your work, maybe it's just getting smarter by watching what you're doing," Mehrotra said. "All of those are different opportunities."
In conclusion, Mehrotra shared his philosophy on the future of work, powered by emerging technology, such as generative AI and agentic software. The first wave of productivity was digitization, "typewriters to word processors," and the second was knowledge-work collaboration, "how to work with people on applications like Google Docs, Office, and Slack," and the third is working with AI agents.
"It's going to look like a document," he said. "But the way we envision it working will surprise people as being a much more assistive experience."
