Who gets to be Superhuman?
“Our little AI agent branding gig just turned into a giant merger of three beloved companies that are building the future of AI-native workspaces, taking the challenge head on.” —Smith & Diction
What looked like a simple rebrand was actually a massive consolidation: Grammarly (the engine) absorbed Coda (the workspace) and Superhuman Mail (the interface) to survive. This isn’t just a name change; it is a survival strategy. In 2025, being the best AI writing tool meant being a feature inside someone else’s platform. To survive, Grammarly had to become the platform.
The Liability of Being a Feature
“The trouble with the name ‘Grammarly’ is, like many names, its strength is its biggest weakness: it’s so precise,” said CEO Shishir Mehrotra. So too, had the name "Grammarly" became a liability. It implies correction (school/grammar) rather than creation or action.
Long loved by writers and non-writers alike, Grammarly’s special sauce is the accessibility from within virtually any window where you are writing. But when that same feature can be emulated by the AI systems native to the platforms where knowledge workers spend their entire day, it becomes a commmodity.
Superhuman is betting its future on Grammarly’s 16-year foundation: the browser extensions and integrations that span a million-plus sites and apps. This AI superhighway allows the company to meet 40 million daily users in their natural digital habitats—Word, Google Docs, iPhone keyboards, and Gmail. In a market defined by the AI productivity gap, this ubiquity is the best defense against the giants.
Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are walled gardens; they work best if you never leave their ecosystem. Superhuman is pitching itself as the Switzerland of software: a platform-agnostic layer that connects your Gmail, Jira, and Salesforce without bias.
The goal is to stand just as tall as the industry’s biggest players and target the $100 billion-plus (AI Business) enterprise productivity market. If successful, Superhuman becomes the premium third option, an invisible layer that automates the drudgery of work across every app you use.
The New Aesthetic of Power
“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,” said Collin Whitehead, Grammarly’s head of product and design.
Smith & Diction has crafted the new identity and shared its behind-the-scenes development alongside refreshed logos for Grammarly and Coda. This is design that visualizes AI-augmented human creativity as both process and output. The flow state visualization, the layering system, the way technical patterns overlay human portraits—all attempt to make visible something usually invisible, like the thought process behind commanding an app.
The gradient-blur-geometry combination leans away from the standard SaaS enterprise efficiency aesthetic and instead embraces a purple called Mysteria (suggesting floating or hovering) paired with a deep maroon called Heart (warmth, grounding).
Superhuman's mascot is “Hero,” a fluid dot with a cape—pure shape and motion. The identity builds a visual world that feels slightly otherworldly, almost cinematic. It represents the shift from a tool that fixes your mistakes (Grammarly) to an entity that gives you superpowers (Go). The written tone juxtaposes hard metrics (speed, efficiency) with aspirational language (“let your brilliance shine”).
Public Perception
“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,” bemused this Fast Company journalist. “The rebrand itself risks confusing existing users and creating SEO challenges, with Superhuman already carrying associations with the acquired email product.”
“It’s a really complicated and frankly scary thing. But the reality is, the Grammarly brand isn’t going anywhere,” said Noam Lovinsky, chief product officer at Superhuman, in an interview with Republic.
“This brilliant and unconventional strategy by Grammarly is, in my opinion, a move to stay relevant and evolve when your main product has become a commodity in the era of AI.” —Nick Malekos
“The key risk is integration friction. Blending Grammarly’s writing intelligence with Superhuman’s speed-focused email workflow and Coda’s structured collaboration capabilities will be an enormous technical and user experience challenge. If the integration is clunky, the powerful brand equity of the original tools could be lost.” —Ken Dulaney
“Orchestrating AI across more than a million integrations is technically complex and potentially fragile. Managing permissions across so many data sources could create friction for users already suffering from ‘consent fatigue.’” —Shelly DeMotte Kramer
“A great AI writing assistant? Every email client will have that within 12 months…What can't be easily duplicated is access to millions of users who trust your brand and use your product daily. Grammarly has that.” —David Kaye
“Superhuman is just way too generic a name and will be banded with Perplexity, ChatGPT, and those ilk without really being clear on what is different about the software. It’s the same story we’ve seen across the tech industry lately, even Microsoft...The irony, of course, is that in chasing the artificial intelligence zeitgeist, Grammarly has become as personality-void-sounding as any other AI program.” WindowsCentral
“Superhuman Go has the potential to bridge the gap for folks between downloading a new AI browser and bringing useful AI features into an existing browser. For now, Superhuman needs to really hammer home that this is convenience baked into a neat package that you’re probably already using; Grammarly has 40 million subscribers, which is a very healthy starting point.” MakeUseOf
“Grammarly no longer wants to be known just for writing corrections. It wants to be known for helping you with all of your work.” INC
