DeepSeek vs Grammarly: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
DeepSeek had $70.7M of annual revenue in FY2026. Grammarly had $700M of annual revenue in FY2025.
Latest financial snapshot
Financial summary
DeepSeek
DeepSeek does not publish revenue or profit figures, and no audited numbers are available; earlier third-party revenue estimates could not be verified and have been removed from this profile. What is reported: the final DeepSeek-V3 training run cost about $5.6 million in rented-GPU terms (2.788 million H800 GPU hours, excluding research and hardware costs), and the company stayed funded by High-Flyer until June 2026. That month it closed a Series A of about 50 billion yuan (~$7.4 billion); Liang personally committed about 20 billion yuan, Tencent about $1.39 billion (10 billion yuan) and CATL about $695 million (5 billion yuan), according to Reuters. Post-money valuation was reported between ~$50 billion (Bloomberg) and ~$59 billion (SCMP). In July 2026 Bloomberg reported talks to raise ~$1.5 billion more at about $71 billion ahead of a mainland IPO targeted for 2027.
Grammarly
Grammarly is private and does not publish audited financial statements. On May 29, 2025, while announcing $1 billion in nondilutive financing from General Catalyst, the company said it had more than $700 million in annual revenue and more than 40 million daily users. The General Catalyst money was structured as capital repaid from revenue generated by the sales and marketing it funds, not as new equity, so the company's last equity valuation is still $13 billion from the November 2021 round led by Baillie Gifford and BlackRock funds. The company was profitable and bootstrapped from 2009 until its first venture round of $110 million in 2017, then raised $90 million in 2019 at a valuation above $1 billion. It has not filed for an IPO.
Revenue and profit by year
DeepSeek
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $70.7M | — | — | +427.6% | Source |
| FY2025 | $13.4M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $1.5M | — | — | — | Source |
Grammarly
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $700M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $650M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2022 run-rate | $500M | — | — | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
DeepSeek
No segment breakdown is published.
Grammarly
- Individual subscriptions
Not disclosed
Monthly or annual Grammarly Pro plans bought by individuals.
- Business and enterprise plans
Not disclosed
Per-seat team, business and enterprise contracts, plus suite plans that include Superhuman Docs, Mail and Go.
- Education licenses
Not disclosed
Institutional plans for schools and universities.
Business model and strategy
DeepSeek
How it makes money
DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals. Its consumer chatbot on web and mobile is free. Model weights are published under the MIT license, so anyone can self-host them;
Growth strategy
DeepSeek's growth plan rests on three moves: keep releasing competitive open-weight models (V4-Pro, V4-Flash and the multimodal V4-Flash-Vision-Exp in 2026) to win developers; undercut closed-model API prices to grow paid usage; and reduce dependence on Nvidia by optimising for Chinese chips, shown by its September 2026 open-source toolkit for Huawei's Ascend accelerators.
Competitive advantage
DeepSeek's edge is cost efficiency: its models use sparse Mixture-of-Experts designs (V3 activates 37B of 671B parameters per token; V4-Pro reportedly 49B of 1.6T) and Multi-head Latent Attention, which let it train and serve near-frontier models with far fewer GPUs than US labs. Open MIT-licensed weights and low API prices give it unusually broad developer reach.
Grammarly
How it makes money
Grammarly runs a freemium subscription model. The free browser extension and apps give basic spelling and grammar fixes and pull in tens of millions of users.
Growth strategy
Grammarly's strategy since 2023 has been to move from correcting text to doing work for the user. It launched GrammarlyGO generative features in 2023. It agreed to acquire Coda in December 2024 and made Coda co-founder Shishir Mehrotra CEO.
Competitive advantage
Grammarly's main advantage is distribution. It runs inside more than 1 million apps and websites through one extension, so users get suggestions in Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, Word or a CRM without copying text into a chatbot. That reach, which the company calls its in-app 'rails', is what Superhuman Go now uses to deliver its own and partner AI agents.
Questions about DeepSeek vs Grammarly
Which company has higher revenue — DeepSeek or Grammarly Inc.?
DeepSeek had $70.7M (FY2026), while Grammarly Inc. had $700.0M (FY2025). By latest annual revenue, Grammarly Inc. is the larger business, with DeepSeek showing a smaller revenue base. Note: these are from different fiscal years and are not a direct like-for-like comparison.
How does revenue per employee compare for DeepSeek and Grammarly Inc.?
DeepSeek has $442k / employee in revenue per employee, while Grammarly Inc. has $700k / employee. Headcounts may use different dates, so the ratio alone does not establish which business operates more efficiently.
How do DeepSeek and Grammarly Inc. make money?
DeepSeek and Grammarly Inc. generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. DeepSeek: DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals. Grammarly Inc.: Grammarly runs a freemium subscription model.
Is DeepSeek bigger than Grammarly Inc.?
By last reported revenue, Grammarly Inc. ($700.0M (FY2025)) is the larger company compared to DeepSeek ($70.7M (FY2026)). Revenue scale is one dimension of size — market capitalisation, employee count, and geographic reach are also relevant depending on the context.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the DeepSeek vs Grammarly overview