Grammarly Inc.
Founders
Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider · Founded 2009 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States
Grammarly was founded by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider in 2009. It is now led by Shishir Mehrotra.
Before Grammarly, Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko built MyDropBox, a plagiarism-detection service for universities that Blackboard acquired in 2007. Their view was that many students plagiarized because they lacked confidence in their own writing. In 2009 they founded Grammarly with Dmytro Lider in Kyiv to help people write well in English in the first place. The first product was a paid web editor sold to students and universities.
Co-founded MyDropBox, a plagiarism-detection service for universities acquired by Blackboard in 2007.
Max Lytvyn co-founded Grammarly in 2009 with Alex Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider. The idea came from their MyDropBox work: helping people write well rather than catching plagiarism afterwards. Lytvyn has been active in support efforts for Ukraine since Russia's 2022 invasion.
Lytvyn is a Ukrainian programmer. Max Lytvyn was born in 1980.
Ukrainian software entrepreneur.
Alex Shevchenko co-founded Grammarly in 2009. He had previously co-founded MyDropbox, a plagiarism detection software that was widely used by universities and eventually acquired by Blackboard. He realized that rather than just catching students cheating after the fact, there was a massive market for a tool that proactively helped people write better English in real-time. Alex Shevchenko was born in 1980.
Ukrainian software developer.
Dmytro Lider co-founded Grammarly in 2009. He served as the primary technical architect during the company's early years in Kyiv, building the highly complex natural language processing (NLP) algorithms required to accurately detect grammatical errors beyond simple spell-checking. He later stepped back from day-to-day operations. Dmytro Lider was born in 1980.
Shishir Mehrotra
Chief Executive Officer
As a highly influential Board Member, he helped guide the company's aggressive, multi-billion dollar valuation rounds and its push into generative AI features.
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury
Chief Executive Officer
Appointed CEO in 2023, the former Google executive is tasked with completely reinventing Grammarly from a mere 'spell checker' into an enterprise-wide communication assistant.
Brad Hoover
Former Chief Executive Officer
Serving as CEO from 2011 to 2023, he took a tiny, self-funded Ukrainian startup and transformed it into a massive $13 billion Silicon Valley unicorn before handing the reins to Roy-Chowdhury.
Grammarly was founded in 2009 by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs and software engineers: Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider.
Before Grammarly, Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn co-founded MyDropBox (an online plagiarism detection tool acquired by Blackboard in 2007). They realized that while catching plagiarism was reactive, students and professionals needed a proactive tool to help them write correctly and expressively in English, leading them to build Grammarly with Dmytro Lider.
The founders bootstrapped Grammarly from 2009 to 2017 without outside venture capital, selling annual subscription software directly to universities and individual students, which generated sufficient cash flow to fund continuous R&D and machine learning talent recruitment.
Dmytro Lider served as Grammarly's Head of Language Technology, leading the engineering team in Kyiv to develop proprietary rule-based and statistical natural language processing algorithms that formed the technological backbone of Grammarly's grammar correction engine.
In 2015, the founders made the transformative strategic decision to launch the free Grammarly browser extension for Google Chrome. This frictionless consumer entry point drove viral global adoption, expanding the user base from thousands of students to millions of everyday professionals.
The founders established the foundational philosophy that AI should enhance and augment human communication rather than replace human thought, designing Grammarly to help humans express their own authentic voice with confidence.
It was founded by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider. While the company is now officially headquartered in San Francisco, they maintain massive pride in their Ukrainian roots. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Grammarly aggressively suspended all business in Russia and donated massive funds to Ukrainian relief efforts.
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