Grammarly Acquires AI Productivity Startup to Take on Notion

Grammarly announced today that it is acquiring Coda, an AI productivity startup that describes itself as “Notion on steroids.”

“As AI permeates every facet of the modern workplace, we’re experiencing one of the biggest technology shifts in our lifetime—one that redefines how we collaborate and get work done,” Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury writes in the announcement post. “Grammarly’s unique window into how individuals and companies use AI today and how they want to use AI in the future has informed where we think this market is headed: a world where humans and AI work together and collaborate everywhere work happens. A world where AI apps and agents feel as comfortable, easy to use, and genuinely helpful as Grammarly.”

Or perhaps I should have described Roy-Chowdhury as the former Grammarly CEO: As part of this announcement, he will be stepping down as CEO and leaving the company, and he’ll be replaced by Coda co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra.

Or perhaps I should have called this acquisition as a merger, since that’s how Mr. Mehrotra describes it on the Coda blog. (Half-kidding. The Coda announcement also uses the term acquisition.)

“Coda is merging with Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for communication and productivity,” he writes. “Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future.”

Whatever you call it, the combined company will be called Grammarly and it will offer products and services from both companies. That includes the Grammarly writing assistant–which Mehrotra calls “the original AI assistant,” given its 15-year lineage–which is used by over 40 million active users, but also Coda’s tools. Which are less familiar to me.

“We launched our first set of AI features [to the Notion-like Coda Docs app] in 2023, and more recently, we have been hard at work on Coda Brain — our new AI assistant,” he explains. “Coda Brain runs on top of our broad array of 800+ privacy-aware integrations to provide individuals with a personal ‘know-it-all’ to make them and their teams more productive. As I watched the foundational capabilities of AI change how just about every tool and surface operates, I started drafting my 2025 planning memo for the team. I titled it ‘the AI-native productivity suite’.”

A meeting between Grammarly and Coda led their respective leaders to see a synergy, both in vision and strategy, and here we are. With this acquisition, or merger, or partnership, or whatever. And a new Grammarly that is focused on making the Grammarly writing assistant smarter and more helpful using context from Coda Brain, unifying the Coda Docs app with Grammarly Assistant to create a Notion killer (my words), and, longer term, to “weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together” into a more cohesive and full-featured productivity suite.

“We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era,” Mehrotra adds. That sounds like something Notion would say, come to think of it.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Coda was valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. The companies expect the transaction to close in January.