Meet Grammarly founders Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider: the AI app turned Lytvyn and Shevchenko into billionaires – but they still give back to their native Ukraine
- Lytvyn and Shevchenko made the Forbes billionaires list in 2021, thanks to US$200 million investments including from Baillie Gifford and BlackRock Inc.
- Their grammar-checking start-up has earned them a net worth of US$4 billion each, but their third co-founder Dmytro Lider’s value is yet to be estimated
Aside from founding Ukraine’s most expensive tech start-up together with Dmytro Lider, and supporting the war-stricken country, what else do we know about them?
1. Grammarly was born from their previous venture, My DropBox
Lytvyn and Shevchenko first crossed paths at the International Christian University in Ukraine. It was in their university days that they developed My DropBox, a plagiarism-detection company. This previous venture inspired the idea for Grammarly. They decided to bring Dmytro Lider on board as a software engineer and made Grammarly available under a freemium model with the option to purchase upgraded versions.
2. They have impressive educational backgrounds
Lytvyn and Shevchenko moved to the US and Canada respectively to pursue master’s degrees in business administration. The former attended Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management while the latter went to the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Lider, meanwhile, had previously earned a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s of science in software engineering from the National Aviation University in Kyiv.
Aside from being Grammarly’s co-founders, this terrific trio also holds specific functional titles. Shevchenko serves as the product lead while Lytvyn works as the head of revenue. Lider, on the other hand, is the head of language technology.
3. They initially launched Grammarly to help students
According to Forbes, Grammarly’s talented trio kick-started the San Francisco-based company to particularly help students with their grammar and spelling. Since then, Lider, Lytvyn and Shevchenko have transformed it into an AI-driven grammar checker that has operations across 500,000 applications and websites.
Grammarly has also expanded into spin-off products, including Grammarly Business. At present, the company has more than 600 employees and claims to have 30 million daily active users, according to its website.