A Chicago AI startup is taking on Grammarly with its software that helps you write error-free sentences.
QuillBot announced Wednesday that it raised more than $4 million in a seed round led by GSV Ventures and Sierra Ventures with participation from Service Provider Capital.
Founded in 2017 by three computer science students at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, QuillBot has created an online service that helps users construct grammatically-correct sentences in English while writing anything from emails to essays.
Using QuillBot, writers receive assistance from the startup’s artificial intelligence bot that can make edits and correct errors. The service is particularly useful for non-English speakers, who need help constructing cohesive sentences with the appropriate sentiment, the startup says. More than 60 percent of current QuillBot users are non-native English speakers.
“It’s a Photoshop for sentences,” said the startup’s co-founder and CEO Rohan Gupta. “The AI is working in conjunction with the human to do everything from sourcing content, and arranging that content and supporting arguments in a very cohesive way, ultimately helping with sentence construction and sentence refinement.”
QuillBot has a free version of its software, but the company offers a premium version for about $15 per month that provides additional features, like Chrome, Microsoft Word and Google Doc integration, and the ability to receive edits on more text characters.
The startup currently has about 1.5 million monthly active users, 8,000 of which are premium subscribers, Gupta said. The startup has users all over the world, but most are concentrated in the U.S. For the last two years leading up to this funding round, Gupta said QuillBot had been bootstrapped and profitable.
The new funding will be used to hire more employees, Gupta said. Currently, QuillBot employs nine people but plans to grow to 25-30 employees by the end of the year.
“Building in Chicago gives us a great advantage because there’s awesome talent here,” Gupta said.
In addition to growing its team, QuillBot is also building new features that allow for summarization of text and auto-generation of sentences.
So far, QuillBot’s biggest competitor is Grammarly, a San Francisco-based tech company that creates browser extensions to help users write clearly and cohesively. It has raised $200 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Gupta said QuillBot has seen a 10 to 15 percent increase in engagement, likely because people are spending more time communicating via emails and messaging rather than in person.
Even though QuillBot was closing its financing round during the pandemic, Gupta said the startup didn’t encounter any challenges in sealing the deal.
“We got so nervous … but we were working with very professional funds and they didn’t even flinch,” Gupta said. “We got lucky there.”
