Ginger Software Raises $6.3M For Its ESL Writing Tools; Adds Former Facebook Exec As CEO

▤ Summary

Ginger Software, the makers of contextual grammar and spell-checking tools, announced today that it has raised $6.3 million in series D financing, led by Israeli investment firm, Vaizra Ventures. For those unfamiliar, Ginger Software’s contextual spell-checking and grammar tools target both those learning English as a second language as well as those suffering from Dyslexia, providing its users with an online service that automatically corrects text as they type. For the billions of ESL learners and the more than 50 million people with Dyslexia in the U.S. and the U.K. alone, Ginger’s patent-pending technology allows them to produce error-free documents, emails, and so on and learn to communicate as a native speaker — with support for Microsoft Office products as well as IE and Firefox. The company’s “Proofreader” product, for example, corrects both spelling and grammar mistakes based on the context around the typed words, learning from each error the user makes, before offering personalized educational tips, lessons, and quizzes based on those miscalculations through its “Personalized Tutor.” Ginger’s technology was developed by a team of natural language processing experts, statisticians, linguists, educators, and more, who created a text-correction algorithm to automatically analyze the context of errors written in English and to select the most appropriate semantic and grammatical correction. “Initially, I quickly dismissed Ginger as boring software for grammar correction,” the company’s new CEO said, “but after digging much deeper into the technology, the platform and the potential usages, I realized that I had just seen the tip of the iceberg and that perhaps the company just did not have the right positioning and message.” Giving it the right message, the former Facebook exec continued, is a meaningful challenge, considering the billions of people around the world who want to learn English (China, in particular, has 325 million English learners), but struggle to maintain their proficiency because they don’t live in an English-speaking environment and thus lack that level of immersion.

$ Funding

▦ Linked Companies

Ginger Software

$1M to $5M