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Image: Superhuman
It’s rare for a company to give up more than a decade of brand recognizability for a new name. It’s even rarer for said company to trade their name for the name of a younger, less well-known company. But that’s exactly what Grammarly, the writing and grammar assistant tool with 40 million daily active users, is doing.
Starting today, Grammarly is rolling out a massive, all-encompassing rebrand to become “Superhuman.”
“Naming a company is like naming a kid,” says Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra. “Renaming your 16-year-old is, like, 10 times harder. Swapping the name of your 16-year-old and your 11-year-old is 100 times harder. That’s probably what we’re doing.”
Grammarly’s new name is pulled directly from the AI-powered email platform Superhuman, which Grammarly acquired back in June. The swap is intended to signal a new beginning as the brand repositions itself from a writing helper to an all-in-one work productivity tool.
Despite the fact that, by Mehrotra’s own admission, Grammarly currently has a “higher brand awareness” than Superhuman, he believes this change is necessary to help consumers buy in on the company’s potential.
“The trouble with the name ‘Grammarly’ is, like many names, its strength is its biggest weakness: it’s so precise,” Mehrotra says. “People’s expectations of what Grammarly can do for them are the reason it’s so popular. You need very little pitch for what it does, because the name explains the whole thing . . . As we went and looked at all the other things we wanted to be able to do for you, people scratch their heads a bit [saying], ‘Wait, I don’t really perceive Grammarly that way.’”
Grammarly’s transformation into Superhuman is so extensive, even the team behind it has some trouble describing exactly what Superhuman is.
To start, here are the basics: Grammarly’s new overarching brand is called Superhuman, but the product at its core is called Superhuman Go. The email app that was once just Superhuman is now Superhuman Mail. From a naming standpoint, it’s definitely confusing.
And on the product side, it’s not much easier to grasp what Superhuman actually does. When I asked Collin Whitehead, Grammarly’s head of product and design, to describe Superhuman Go in as few words as possible, he took a full 10 seconds to gather his thoughts.
“Essentially, what we’re trying to do is build an agentic platform where users can get the power of AI everywhere that they already work,” he says.
For context, Grammarly has been an AI-powered company since its inception in 2009, building a writing and grammar tool that used natural language processing to offer edits to users. Over the past few years, it’s been introducing generative tools that not only improve users’ own words, but help them draft new original text, as well as offering more subjective writing suggestions for better clarity and impact.
More recently, Grammarly has embarked on a spending spree to acquire additional AI companies that expand its scope. In December 2024, Grammarly acquired Coda, an AI-powered work platform that’s like a combination of Google Docs, Airtable, and Notion. (Mehrotra actually founded Coda, and became CEO of Grammarly post acquisition). Then, in June 2025, Grammarly also acquired Superhuman.
The terms of both deals were undisclosed, but Coda and Superhuman were last valued at $1.4 billion and $835 million, respectively, in 2021. Now, Grammarly is using those new investments to turn Superhuman into a much more all-encompassing work tool.
Mehrotra explains it like this: Grammarly has always run on the “AI superhighway,” meaning that, instead of living on its own platform, Grammarly travels with you to places like Google Docs, email, or your Notes app to help improve your writing. Superhuman will use that superhighway to bring a huge new range of productivity tools to wherever you’re working.
“We bring AI right to where people work,” Mehrotra says. “The analogy is, we only run one car on that highway, and that’s the one with your high school grammar teacher in it. But the idea is, what if it could be all the different agents and assistants that you would like?”
Starting today, Grammarly users can turn on Superhuman Go by clicking on the Grammarly icon in their browser and toggling the product on.
From there, they’ll get a step-by-step onboarding to Superhuman Go. Users can look through a library of dozens of productivity agents and choose which they’d like to use. Options include a Gmail agent, which can draft and send new messages from any other workspace and summarise insights from emails; a calendar agent that can help schedule meetings from anywhere; and a Reader Reaction agent that can break down the most likely reader responses to whatever you might be working on. Several writing-based agents with the former Grammarly branding will also be available.
With so many moving parts, Whitehead says, Superhuman needed a new identity that was versatile enough to introduce users to its capabilities. That started with picking a name.
“That is definitely something that we heavily debated,” Whitehead says. “I was leading that naming process, and we were coming up with names that had never existed before; names that were fully abstract and totally made up, but had a nice mouth feel.” The name, he adds, had to be powerful, unique to the user, and human-centric—something that would make the user feel better for having used it. As the abstract naming process continued, nothing was clicking.
“Elevating the user was such a key part of the brief that, when we got notice about the potential [Superhuman] acquisition, it was like an earworm—we couldn’t unsee the connection between that Superhuman name and what we were going for,” Whitehead noted.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grace Snelling is an editorial assistant for Fast Company with a focus on product design, branding, art, and all things Gen Z. Her stories have included an exploration into the wacky world of Duolingo’s famous mascot, an interview with the New Yorker’s art editor about the scramble to prepare a cover image of Donald Trump post-2024 election, and an analysis of how the pineapple became the ultimate sex symbol.
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