For context, Coda's last valuation was $1.4B in July 2021 and Grammarly's was $13B in November 2021. Grammarly's revenue is likely taking a hit with the rise of LLMs and they were always at risk of being a feature by not owning the document editor itself. An all-in-one approach to compete with Notion (and Google Docs, Confluence, Sharepoint, etc) makes sense, but time will tell if this merger works.
Coda is an incredibly powerful doc platform -- I first discovered it while working at a previous startup, and it became my absolute favorite.
On my last week there, I built out a rip-off of Guitar Hero in Coda itself. We had a "multiplayer" doc where 20 of us competed (and cheated) for the top score. I didn't get a recording of that session, but here's a pre-game demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs23O3vewvg
Post from the Coda blog: https://coda.io/blog/about-coda/grammarly-acquires-coda
New chapter in the AI arms race
Grammarly has been having an identity crisis ever since LLMs made grammar checking accessible to every company at a fraction of the cost. ChatGPT is killing a lot of companies and grammarly was the first collateral.
This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge red flag to Coda users.
However it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.